Shartefacts are all things surrounding, associated with, or directly participating in the "shell experience". Shartefacts include FS items (significant files, dirs, dotfiles, file descriptors), environmental aspects (shell config, shell and user variables, env vars, enabled shell builtins, shell functions and aliases), command line aspects (line editing mode, readline config, keybindings, history), user items (user preferences, customizations, prompt config, shell theme, dircolors, cmdline completions, user mask, user limit, locale), terminal aspects (tty, pty, stty settings, $TERM, color depth, Unicode compliance), and much more. In a word, everything's shartefact.
Shontologists try to determine what are the categories of the highest order, and the possible and necessary set of properties featured by a sufficiently granualar yet all-encompassing shartefact classification system (SCS). The primary shontological question is what shartefacts actually exist. The secondary shontological question is what categories and subcategories are possible and necessary to make a decent way of organizing and describing shartefacts with an eye toward curbing complexity but gaining hierarchy.