the.com/provenience
where a thing was found beats what a thing is, in archaeology's strictest sense.
means the precise three-dimensional spot an artifact occupied before anyone dug it up, recorded relative to everything around it.
from from latin provenire, to come forth; american archaeologists in the early 1900s split it from provenance to mean exact findspot, not just chain of ownership.
vs provenanceprovenance tracks ownership history, provenience tracks burial location
destroyed on excavationonce you dig it up you can never re-measure it
grid obsessionarchaeologists log x, y, z coordinates for every fragment
for instance
pompeii excavations — ash layers let archaeologists pin bodies to the exact moment of death, 79 ad
olduvai gorge — leakey team mapped every bone's spot to date early hominins, 1930s onward
looted antiquities cases — artifacts without provenience become legally and scientifically worthless