Where does my Written Artefact come from?
Provenience
Stylianos Aspiotis, Olivier Bonnerot
Two terms have been widely used to express the history of an artefact: provenience and provenance. Provenience refers to the location where the artefact was originally created. Provenance usually has a broader meaning, referring to all the different locations and hands in which the artefact has been since its creation (Price and Burton 2011). In Natural Sciences, however, the locution “Provenance Studies” is normally understood as the investigation concerning the place of production of an object, or of the origin of the materials constituting the object (both raw and manufactured), thus actually referring to their provenience, and only in some cases also including the reconstitution of “chaînes opératoires” and ancient trading routes. In this entry we will use the terms provenience and provenance as in the aforementioned paper.
The information gathered through the analysis of the provenience of materials and artefacts can also contribute greatly to studies of the dissemination of techniques and ideas over specific areas and timespans, and assist in dating objects and reconstructing their history (for example, identification of restored parts).
In order to obtain as much information as possible, and to fill in the missing pieces that can lead to an artefact's provenience, material analysis methods are needed. Unfortunately, no single analytical technique can directly provide information regarding the origin of an artefact. The possibility of conducting such studies and the choice of relevant techniques will depend on the exact nature of the object. Sometimes, the presence of a specific material (such as a pigment used only in a specific region, or the identification of a rock or mineral which comes from only one specific mine) will be enough, but in most cases the investigation of many small details of the object will be required to establish the origin of the materials, such as the identification and quantification of trace elements or isotopes. Stable isotope analysis of carbon and oxygen as well as of transition metals (e.g. Fe, Zn, Ag) is well established and can link the material composition of a historical object/manuscript/pigment to its source. Stable isotopes of C and O by measuring the ratios of 13C/12C and 18O/16O are well known for marble provenience analysis and have been widely used for marble quarries in the Mediterranean region (e.g. Attanasio et al. 2006; Lapuente et al. 2014; Prochaska 2023). The measured isotopic values are expressed in terms of the deviation from a reference standard and are given as δ13C and δ18O, which define the isotopic signature of the studied sample. This information is only useful once enough studies have been done on similar objects to build databases, and particularly when the isotopic signature of reference samples, such as those from marble quarries, is known. Moreover, discriminating between sources of similar chemical affinity can be facilitated when the isotopic signature is coupled with the major and trace element composition. Since stable isotope analysis is micro-destructive and requires only a few mg of sample, such studies using this technique should always be conducted after all other information, such as typology, archaeological context etc. has been gathered.
With the development of archaeometry in the last decades and the spreading of new techniques, studying the provenience of artefacts has become common, especially for ceramic, rocks, metallic and glass objects. In general, the analysis of specific minerals and minor elements in the clay is used to assign an origin to ceramic objects. Concerning glass objects, it is usually minor and trace elements that can give such information, as well as the techniques employed to colour, opacify or make the glass transparent (Degryse et al. 2009, Bonnerot et al. 2015). Isotope and trace elements analyses, performed with X-ray emission spectrometry or other suitable techniques, are often employed to assign metallic or rock-based objects to a specific region or even in some cases to a specific mine or quarry (Chlouveraki et al. 2008, Fischer 2023). The identification of specific organic materials, for example with mass spectrometry, can also be used to establish the provenience of substances (Nardin et al. 2019). Finally, DNA and proteomic analysis of organic materials like parchment can sometimes hint at specific origins (Teasdale et al. 2015).
Similarly to other objects, manuscripts often possess characteristic material features that can be correlated with a certain geographic origin, author, scribe, or scriptorium. Here the work focuses on establishing such characteristic features in order to determine the origin of the manuscript. For example, recent analyses have identified the presence of a remarkably high amount of zinc in the inks used in Erfurt around the 13th-14th century. This may be indicative of the use of particular raw material in the region of Erfurt at that time (Hahn et al. 2007, Gordon et al. 2020, Nehring et al. 2021).