The importance of provenance or the location of origin of an object has been kicking around almost forever.  Say someone has a valuable piece of jewelry and you like it and want it and are willing to pay a handsome price for it. Then you get curious and ask where it came from.  Without “papers” (such as provided along with the fancy breed of dog you fancied) you have no idea if the “history” of the object will add to its value to you or the next owner.  Grandma’s prized thingamajig has always had a history and it was a matter of pride to her and her descendants that it had this record.  Paperwork that PROVES where it came from and who subsequent owners were would help tremendously.

Provenance is extremely important as we dig down under the surface of ancient places and find overlooked treasures either in pieces or remarkably almost whole.  If there is an archaeologist or anthropologist or some other certified expert in such excavations and are on the scene, provenance is provided instantly.  If the artifact turns up in a shop and you are told where it came from it is not quite the same thing if “paperwork” accompanies it.

Once I bought a pair of very pretty hanging lamps that I was told came from a convent in Missouri.  The history sold me but there was no proof.  I also owned briefly an interesting glass cover for an outside bulb on my porch that came from a shop in the old part of Red Bank, New Jersey.  But neither of these prized possessions came any where near the huge priced antiquities from ancient Greece, Italy, Iraq or Egypt bring – particularly if they have traceable histories.

A very big bone of contention are the contents of private museums that are owned by very rich people who have paid enormous prices for seemingly rare and truly original works by ancient peoples.  The holes dug by grave robbers and other thieves in the night leave pockmarked middens left by ancients who threw away “garbage” which today brings fantastic prices on the market even if there is no provenance to go along with them.

One of my memories is my fascination with a statue of a “Trojan” warrior whose almost complete remains were found in a tomb (questionable) and whose picture I drew on my school notebook used when I attended sophomore year in South Side High School.  Many years later I learned that because of lack of provenance, this statue was a hoax.  Interestingly, there is an industry operating today where such objects are produced of the same materials the original artists used to create the ones for which there is provenance.  It is hard to tell the difference but if you have the paperwork, the worth goes up exponentially.