Provenience

Many archaeologists, especially in North America, separate two words. Provenience is where an object was found: site, trench, layer and exact position. Provenance is the history of the object after it left the ground: who owned it, where it was sold and how it travelled. British usage often has provenance for both, which causes confusion.

The distinction matters for Cypriot material. Many objects in private hands and in museums have a provenance, sometimes a well-documented one, but no recorded provenience, because they came from old unrecorded digging or were chosen out of tomb groups long ago. Collecting Cypriot Antiquities Today keeps the two apart for this reason. Scientific provenance studies of clay or stone use a third sense: where the raw material came from.