Provenance and Provenience

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Provenance and provenience are two terms often used interchangeably, despite their distinct meanings. Joyce (2012) provides a clear summary of the scholarly community’s position on this topic. The two words have become associated with the perspectives of scholars from two different disciplines: art history and archaeology. These terms are also central to the ongoing debate over illegal antiquities.

Provenance
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Provenance, a concept embraced by art historians, refers to the ownership history of a historical artifact. It traces the artifact’s journey from its place of discovery through time, including the various hands that have held it (Brodie et al., 2023, p. 15). While provenance ideally begins with the object’s creation, in practice, it often starts at the point of the artifact’s removal from its archaeological context. The term is frequently used as a synonym for an object’s chain of custody. Bedford (2020, p. 415) provides a detailed and well-articulated definition of provenance as “the chronology of ownership, custody, or location of an object, document, or group of documents over its full history.” The author further argues that the primary purpose of tracing an object’s provenance is to establish contextual and circumstantial evidence for its original production or discovery. This is achieved by reconstructing, as precisely as possible, its later history, particularly the sequences of formal ownership, custody, and storage.

Provenience
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Provenience is a term predominantly used in archaeology to denote the findspot—the exact physical location where an artifact was discovered—considered as a three-dimensional location in space (Joyce 2012: 49). However, archaeologists often use both provenance and provenience to refer to different, yet overlapping, concepts (Kolb 2014: 6173). Both terms can also describe an object’s source of raw materials or its place of manufacture.

Weigand et al. (1977: 24), in formulating the “provenience postulate,” use the term provenience to refer specifically to the source of raw material. The postulate states that the chemical composition of materials from a single source should be more uniform than the differences between materials from different sources. In other words, if a material comes from a distinct geological or geographical source, its chemical signature will remain consistent even if it is transported elsewhere. This allows archaeologists to trace the origin of artifacts by analyzing their chemical composition and comparing it to known sources. Similarly, Price and Burton (2011: 213) suggest that provenience has a dual meaning, referring both to the place of discovery and the place of origin.

The ongoing debate over the handling of illegally excavated antiquities has significantly influenced how the concepts of provenance and provenience are interpreted and applied. Without delving into the complexities of this highly contested issue, it suffices to say that some scholars argue that objects with unknown provenience—meaning their place of discovery is undocumented, often due to illegal excavations—lose much of their archaeological value due to the loss of context and should therefore not be studied.

Bibliography
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Bedford, Denise. 2020. Knowledge Architectures: Structures and Semantics. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429268915.

Brodie, Neil, Morag M. Kersel, and Josephine Munch Rasmussen, eds. 2023. “Variant Scholarship: Ancient Texts in Modern Contexts.” In Variant Scholarship: Ancient Texts in Modern Contexts, edited by Neil Brodie, Morag M. Kersel, and Josephine Munch Rasmussen, 13–19. Leiden: Sidestone Press. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/62881.

Joyce, Rosemary A. 2012. “From Place to Place: Provenience, Provenance, and Archaeology.” In Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, edited by Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Jackson Reist, 48–60. Getty Publications.

Kolb, Charles C. 2014. “Provenance Studies in Archaeology.” In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, edited by Claire Smith, 6172–81. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_327.

Price, T. Douglas, and James H. Burton. 2011. “Provenience and Provenance.” In An Introduction to Archaeological Chemistry, edited by T. Douglas Price and James H. Burton, 213–42. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6376-5_8.

Weigand, Phil C., Garman Harbottle, and Edward V. Sayre. 1977. “Turquoise Sources and Source Analysis: Mesoamerica and the Southwestern U.S.A.” In Exchange systems in prehistory, edited by Timothy K. Earle and Jonathon E. Ericson, 15-34. New York: Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-227650-7.50008-0.

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