Provenance

Provenance, from the French provenir, "to come from", refers to the chronology of the ownership or location of a historical object. The term was originally mostly used in relation to works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including archaeology, paleontology, archives, manuscripts, printed books, and science and computing. The primary purpose of tracing the provenance of an object or entity is normally to provide contextual and circumstantial evidence for its original production or discovery, by establishing, as far as practicable, its later history, especially the sequences of its formal ownership, custody, and places of storage. The practice has a particular value in helping authenticate objects. Comparative techniques, expert opinions, and the results of scientific tests may also be used to these ends, but establishing provenance is essentially a matter of documentation.

In archaeology (particularly North American archaeology and anthropological archaeology throughout the world), the term provenience is used in related but a subtly different sense to provenance. Archaeological researchers use provenience to refer to the three-dimensional location of an artifact or feature within an archaeological site, whereas provenance covers an object's complete documented history. Provenience can be used more broadly (e.g. the name of valley or estate), especially when an artifact was found by a private party and its specific position not recorded. Any given antiquity may therefore have both a provenience (where it was found) and a provenance (where it has been since it was found). In rare cases, e.g. known artisanship or original ownership, an antiquity's provenance may include facts that predate its entry into the archaeological record, as well as those relating to its history after rediscovery.