Kindred contexts: archives, archaeology, and the concept of provenance

Abstract

The disciplines of archives and archaeology are each about the power of context: they both preserve the context wherein objects and records are found and created to aid in their interpretation and take those materials as evidence of context. As context-based disciplines, archives and archaeology foreground the concept of provenance and construct meanings about objects and records from contextual relationships. Context, which is related to but also distinct from provenance, is difficult to disentangle from the latter. While sometimes conflated and used interchangeably, subtle differences distinguish the two concepts. This article explores the ways that archives and archaeology employ the concepts of provenance and context, and the messiness with which they do. Fundamentally, this exercise aims to understand where they might share common ground while enriching discussion and fostering introspection and cross-disciplinary exchange and suggest ways these fields might rethink and extend their own uses of these concepts.