My preferred metaphor has been capital formation (I have a half-assed unpublished manifesto about this, but wrote a bit about it here) and I love how purely the ideas in this post and its comments get at a similar idea -- digging through the past, finding things that could be valuable in the present.

The chief distinction vs the archeology metaphor would seem to be that, with capital formation, you're taking things people produced before and adding new things that give them more value. Someone creates a widget, and you incorporate it into your new invention: the old has scaffolded the new. The connection between past and present is manifest.

Larry Lessig wrote a great book on "remixing" which gets at this. Eric von Hippel wrote on democratizing innovation which hits many similar points, probably closer to true capital formation.