Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript page with an initial text being scraped or washed off in order to reuse it, a practice dictated by economy as parchment supports were scarce.

In architecture and archaeology, the term denotes an object made or worked upon for one purpose and later reused for another.

In literary stylistics, a text bearing traces of previous meanings or suggestions. In George Orwell's 1984, a palimpsest is a metaphor for Big Brother's constant rewriting of history, as records are "scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary".