Artifact

Alteration of artefact, from Italian artefatto, from Latin arte ("by skill"), (ablative of ars ("art")) + factum ("thing made"), from facere ("")

Full definition of artifact

(plural artifacts)

An object made or shaped by human hand.
(archaeology) An object, such as a tool, weapon or ornament, of archaeological or historical interest, especially such an object found at an archaeological excavation.The dig produced many Roman artifacts.
Something viewed as a product of human conception or agency rather than an inherent element.

"The very act of looking at a naked model was an artifact of male supremacy" (Philip Weiss).

A structure or finding in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error.The spot on his lung turned out to be an artifact of the X-ray process.
An object made or shaped by some agent or intelligence, not necessarily of direct human origin.
(computing) A perceptible distortion that appears in a digital image, audio or video file as a result of applying a lossy compression algorithm.This JPEG image has been so highly compressed that it has too many unsightly compression artifacts, making it unsuitable for the cover of our magazine.