David Gill ('Art Historians misunderstanding provenance? ' weds 2nd Oct 2013) writes "readers of LM will know that I am trying to discourage the term provenance for archaeological material. One of the reasons is that we need to focus on collecting histories". I was almost caught out myself trying to present the paper by Deborah Lehr when I got to this sentence:
"We encourage people to [...] stop purchasing artifacts with unclear provenance",here the term "collecting history" is unambiguous. A dodgy scarab sold on Grebkesh and Runn's website after all has a "provenance" - Egypt. Here the issue is not which region of the world it came from, but how it came on the market and how it arrived in Mr Grebkesh's stockroom.
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For my full thoughts on this term: here.
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