Glossary Collecting and the antiquities trade
Unprovenanced
Also called: unprovenienced
Describes an object whose find-spot is unknown, and often whose earlier ownership history is undocumented as well.
The word is used loosely. In scholarship it usually means that the find-spot is unknown, even if the object has been in a museum for a century. In the antiquities trade it tends to mean that the ownership history is missing or cannot be verified, which raises the question of whether the object left its country of origin lawfully.
A large share of the Cypriot antiquities abroad is unprovenanced in the first sense, the result of nineteenth-century digging, colonial-era partage and museum sales, and the licensed trade that lasted until 1996. Scholars still use such pieces: the private collections published from the 1960s onwards anchor the study of unprovenanced Cypriot types (The Legal Export of Cypriot Antiquities). They are dated by comparison with excavated examples.
Related terms
- Find-spot
The place where an object was found, recorded at anything from village level to an exact position in a tomb or trench.
- Provenience
The precise find-spot of an excavated object, recorded by site, layer and position; in this usage kept distinct from provenance, its ownership history.
- Export licence
An official permit allowing an antiquity to leave its country of origin; in Cyprus, issued by the Department of Antiquities from 1935.
- 1970 UNESCO Convention
The 1970 international treaty on preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of cultural property; its year is the trade's usual provenance benchmark.