Friday, May 21, 2021

The importance of provenance

MAPPING MUSEUM COLLECTIONS: Provenance: How an object's origin can facilitate authentic, inclusive storytelling (University of Missouri in Phys.org).
With a three-year grant, [assistant professor Sarah] Buchanan is investigating ways to conduct provenance research more efficiently, inclusively and transparently, both on MU's campus and abroad. In a recently published study, Buchanan collaborated with Sara Mohr, a doctoral student at Brown University who reads and translates Assyrian, to create an online bibliography and corresponding map of ancient tablets located in universities throughout the United States, including six tablets inside MU's Ellis Library.
For more on the probably mostly fake post-2002 Dead Sea Scroll-like fragments, see here and links and here. The provenance (history of acquistion and past and current locations) of artifacts are and have been important in many stories of ancient and supposedly ancient objects, including the Gospel of Jesus' Wife and (currently) the Sappho papyri and the Oxford missing papyri scandal. For all three, see here.

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