{"id":6585,"date":"2024-04-16T13:51:07","date_gmt":"2024-04-16T17:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/?p=6585"},"modified":"2024-05-03T09:45:53","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T13:45:53","slug":"the-provenance-reliability-index","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/2024\/04\/16\/the-provenance-reliability-index\/","title":{"rendered":"The Provenance Reliability Index"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Liz Neill<\/span><\/h4>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my dissertation, \u201cAncient Travels, Modern Geographies: Provenance(s) of Imagined Creatures on Archaic Painted Pottery (660-480 BCE),\u201d I analyze where and how different \u201cspecies\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Readers may be familiar with \u201ctombstone\u201d information often found on museum labels, which includes an object\u2019s creation date, artist or workshop, style, material, and possibly its place of creation: all information about the beginning <\/em>of an object\u2019s ancient life. An object\u2019s field context refers to the end <\/em>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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u201cCentral Italy (?)\u201d or \u201csaid to be from Athens\u201d). 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\u2019s field context.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Figure 1. Attributed to Boreads Painter (Greek (Lakonian), active 575\u2014550 BCE). Black-Figure Kylix (Drinking Cup)<\/em> (570 BCE). Terracotta. 4.8 x 7 x 5.5 in. (12 x 17.8 x 14 cm). This cup has been reconstructed from multiple fragments. While stylistically identifiable as Lakonian, it does not have any associated findspot information (Category 5). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 85.AE.121.1. Digital image courtesy of Getty\u2019s Open Content Program.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The following objects illustrate the range of contexts across the Index\u2019s five categories. For example, the rim of an Attic\u00a0dinos<\/i>\u00a0(large decorated container) excavated from a\u00a0bothros<\/em>\u00a0(votive well) at the sanctuary of Aeolus\u00a0on the island of Lipari\u00a0would belong to Category 1 (Lipari 19000<\/a>). A Caeretan\u00a0hydria\u00a0<\/i>(water vessel)\u00a0known to come from a necropolis at Cerveteri (Caere), without further context, would belong to Category 2 (Villa Giulia 50649<\/a>). An Attic\u00a0lekythos<\/i> (oil vessel) recently repatriated from the San Antonio Museum of Art to Italy would belong to Category 3 (DEAC.91.80.1<\/a>)<\/span>. A Corinthian\u00a0aryballos<\/i>\u00a0(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<\/a>). Lastly, a Laconian kylix with no findspot would belong to Category 5 (Getty 85.AE.121.1<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201ccreature pot corpus\u201d 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 \u201cmonsters\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 2. Ancient and modern geographies of the Hydra mapped with ArcGIS Online. Digital image created by and courtesy of the author.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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<\/em> of an object\u2019s 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), \u201csaid to be from\u201d 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).<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

____________________<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Liz Neill <\/strong>is an archaeologist, museum professional, and fifth-year PhD Candidate at Boston University specializing in ancient art and provenance. Her dissertation investigates different \u201cspecies\u201d of imagined creatures on Archaic vases and how their geographies, ancient and modern, shape our perceptions of the ancient world.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6585"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6762,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6585\/revisions\/6762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}