Provenance

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Provenance is the origin or source from which something comes, and the history of subsequent owners (also known as Chain of custody in some fields). The term is often used in the sense of place and time of manufacture, production or discovery. Comparative techniques, expert opinion, written and verbal records and the results of tests are often used to help establish provenance.

The provenance of works of fine art, antiques and antiquities often assumes great importance. Documented evidence of provenance for an object can help to establish that it has not been altered and is not a forgery or a reproduction. Knowledge of provenance can help to assign the work to a known artist and a documented history can be of use in helping to prove ownership. The quality of provenance of an important work of art can make a considerable difference to its selling price in the market; this is affected by the degree of certainty of the provenance, the status of past owners as collectors, and in many cases by the strength of evidence that an object has not been illegally excavated or exported from another country. The provenance of a work of art may be recorded in various forms depending on context or the amount that is known, from a single name to an entry in a full scholarly catalogue several thousand words long.

Evidence of provenance can be of importance in the fields of archaeology and palaeontology. Fakes are not unknown and finds are sometimes removed from the context in which they were found without documentation, reducing their value to the world of learning. Even when discovered apparently in-situ archaeological finds must sometimes be treated with caution, the provenance of a find may not be properly represented by the context in which it was found. Artifacts can be moved far from their place of origin by mechanisms that include looting, collecting, theft or trade and further research is often required to establish the true provenance of a find. Most museums make strenuous efforts to record how the works in their collections were acquired and these records are often of use in helping to establish provenance. Fossils can also move from their primary context and are sometimes found, apparently in-situ, in geological deposits to which they do not belong, moved by, for example, the erosion of nearby but geologically different outcrops.

In the archiving and the management of records proof of provenance is provided by the operation of control systems that document the history of records kept in an archive, including details of amendments made to them. It was developed in the nineteenth century by both French and Prussian archivists.

Scientific research is generally held to be of good provenance when it is documented in detail sufficient to allow reproducibility.

Provenance is a fundamental principle of archives, referring to the individual, group, or organization that created or received the items in a collection. According to archival theory and the principle of provenance, records of different provenance should be separated.

In North American archaeology, and to a lesser extent in anthropological archaeology throughout the world, the term provenience is sometimes used instead. Usually the two terms are synonymous; however, some researchers use provenience to refer only to the exact location in a site where an artifact was excavated, in contrast to provenance which includes the artifact's complete documented history.