The Provenance Reliability Index
by Liz Neill
Provenance: literally, where something comes from. Once considered secondary to the aesthetic value of an artwork or a secret to be hidden in restricted files, object histories have become more widely discussed by archaeologists and art historians in recent decades. Major US museums, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the San Antonio Museum of Art, have hired staff to ensure their collections are up to date. Every museum object has its own history. Cultural heritage experts, archaeologists, and politicians worked together to author the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which created the current professional standard for ancient art: any antiquities being sold, imported, or exported to countries that have ratified the Convention must have object histories dating back to 1970 to be considered licit. However, a pre-1970 record is a binary checkbox that glosses over the earlier origin and acquisition histories. Centuries of the antiquities trade have left scholars with intermediate shades of gray. This ambiguity in the dataset is both a limitation and an opportunity: the wide range of geographical data offers more ways to analyze, preserve, and exhibit ancient art while acknowledging the complex history of the field.
In my dissertation, “Ancient Travels, Modern Geographies: Provenance(s) of Imagined Creatures on Archaic Painted Pottery (660-480 BCE),” I analyze where and how different “species” of creatures painted on pots were moved around the ancient Mediterranean and modern worlds, and the impact of these movements on our understanding of Archaic iconographies. In order to analyze these ancient and modern movements, scholars and curators need a system that works with degrees of provenance. I have developed the Provenance Reliability Index for my own research and for others who study moveable material culture.
Readers may be familiar with “tombstone” information often found on museum labels, which includes an object’s creation date, artist or workshop, style, material, and possibly its place of creation: all information about the beginning of an object’s ancient life. An object’s field context refers to the end of its ancient life. This includes where and in what type of use-context an object was found (i.e. grave, house, workshop, sanctuary, etc.), which objects were found together in that context, and the context’s approximate use date. This information is particularly crucial for moveable material culture (including pottery) because ancient trade networks often resulted in the movement of objects far from their origin point.
The Index highlights a range of provenance reliability across five categories. Category One objects have been excavated scientifically and have a publicly known field context. Category Two objects may have a deposition site, but no exact context (i.e. from the necropolis at Vulci but does not have an associated tomb assemblage). These objects mostly were excavated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the now-standard practice of documenting field context was a priority. Category Three is the most sparse and contains objects demonstrated to come from a looted context. Category Four contains objects with second- or third-hand findspots from dealers, collectors, or indirect historical sources which may or may not be accurate (i.e. “Central Italy (?)” or “said to be from Athens”). Lastly, Category Five includes objects that have no findspot information. While it is possible to somewhat contextualize these objects based on their style, there is no replacement for knowing an object’s field context.
The following objects illustrate the range of contexts across the Index’s five categories. For example, the rim of an Attic dinos (large decorated container) excavated from a bothros (votive well) at the sanctuary of Aeolus on the island of Lipari would belong to Category 1 (Lipari 19000). A Caeretan hydria (water vessel) known to come from a necropolis at Cerveteri (Caere), without further context, would belong to Category 2 (Villa Giulia 50649). An Attic lekythos (oil vessel) recently repatriated from the San Antonio Museum of Art to Italy would belong to Category 3 (DEAC.91.80.1). A Corinthian aryballos (oil vessel) said to be from Thebes and purchased in Athens by an agent of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston would belong to Category 4 (MFA 95.1). Lastly, a Laconian kylix with no findspot would belong to Category 5 (Getty 85.AE.121.1).
The “creature pot corpus” is a useful first dataset to demonstrate the Provenance Reliability Index because the corpus has a good distribution across the categories, creatures were painted on a range of ceramics from various production sites, and “monsters” appeal to a wide audience and have circulated across both the ancient and modern worlds. This index is meant to be easily usable and repurposable. The categories within the index can apply to other types of art that were removed from their places of origin since the eighteenth century, such as Roman portrait busts or Benin bronzes.
What does it mean to juxtapose ancient and modern geographies? Often, on museum labels, visitors see only a stylistically-identified production site from the beginning of an object’s ancient life, one point on a much longer timeline that extends through today. In contrast, Figure 2 showcases six different geographies of Hydra ceramics across both the ancient world and the modern world: the mythological location of the Hydra at Lerna (as described by ancient poet Hesiod) (green triangle), production sites in Greece and Etruria (red diamond), known find spots around the Mediterranean (blue circle), “said to be from” findspots (black x), regional relocations of objects to archaeological museums (orange square), and the constellation of objects removed to western Europe and the United States (light blue pentagon).
This corpus provides a wealth of data that can be reinterpreted and represented in many ways: art historical scholars can study the diachronic evolutions and movements of a single creature, archaeologists can study the trade and comparative distributions of vase shapes, styles, and types in the Archaic period, and curators can contextualize their collections within the full universe of imagined creatures on painted pottery across the Mediterranean. Most importantly, this project addresses the urgent issue of ethically interpreting pre-1970 objects that have unclear or no provenance. My dissertation confronts the reality that the majority of ancient Mediterranean painted pottery has been permanently divorced from its original field context and offers one path forward. Ideally, this new dataset, alongside the digital text of my dissertation, will promote discussions of provenance, trade routes, the development of black-figure style, charting the development of antiquities collections, and many more avenues of research.
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Liz Neill is an archaeologist, museum professional, and fifth-year PhD Candidate at Boston University specializing in ancient art and provenance. Her dissertation investigates different “species” of imagined creatures on Archaic vases and how their geographies, ancient and modern, shape our perceptions of the ancient world.