Hello OA!

[Jargal]

If you have a system in mind great, if not list the article and I’m sure we can find a suitable place for it.

I have some minimum requirements for the system in mind, but they are very general and, as far as I understand current OA canon, easy to meet.

Basically it would come to down to what the colonists wanted.
...
Perhaps the level of infrastructure and 'challenge' is something that is worked out during initial colony planning or a potential colonies send out something like a prospectus that lays out how the colony will be set up, including the level of challenge. Potential colonists would then look these over and decide which mission meets their desires and decide to 'invest' their time and effort with it.

So it's acceptable for the colonist in the, let's say, "Year 32 from The Arrival" to think: "Ok, we have build all the needed starting infrastructure, let's think about something more creative and interesting". Ok, it suits me for my idea.

Archeology certainly exists in the setting, but to date I think we've pretty much only ever considered it in relation to ancient xenosophont civilizations and even then I don't think we've directly spoken in terms of archeology - although that is what is actually happening. OA has a bunch of vanished alien civilizations lying around and logically the information about them in the EG had to come from a form of archeology (xenoarcheology).

Speaking about xenoarcheology. Universe is old, xenosophonts are rare, this I understand. But youngest xenos remains in OA, as I've found, are tens of millions years old. Is there some principial rule that no extinct xeno civilization can be found, ceased to exist only hundreds of thousands/1-2 millions of years ago? If we talk about Low-tech (maybe up to Middle-tech) society, after just a million of years even on our single planet finds happen only by chance. Not very archeologically friendly situation :-)

There are also a number of mentions of the remnants of the works of ancient Ahuman AIs being left behind in various star systems after they were forced out the Solar System early in the timeline. But again, although this might fall under the umbrella of archeology, it isn't described that way for some reason.

It's looks like a sort of "industrial archaeology" with additional challenge of industry being ahuman in origin.

Looking beyond these examples - Logically, there should be some number of failed colony missions over the history of the setting, especially in the earlier part of the timeline when the technology and know-how for setting up a new colony wasn't as developed. We do make passing mention of failed missions here and there in the EG, but seem to mainly treat these as 'the ship never made it to the system' without providing details or talking about colonies that failed after arrival.

For me this is looks like the largest area of archeology in the current era. Even with all available data storage technologies, records are written by sophonts, and sophonts can lie and make mistakes. Artefact can't lie, it can only be misinterpreted, and this is why you need professionals :-)

The upshot of all this is that you have pointed out an area of OA that is not as fully developed as it should be. You (and others if they are interested) can think of this as a giant blank canvas waiting to be painted on, if you feel like it. If that feels too much like 'bringing your work home with you' and you'd rather spend time and attention on other aspects of OA, that's perfectly fine as well

There are pro and contra... I'll think about it all.