Ever been confused about the difference between provenience and provenance? I still am. As I understand it, provenience refers to the specific location where an object was unearthed, whereas provenance refers either to an object’s ownership history, or to its geographic origins more generally (that is, roughly where it entered the archaeological record, not where it was made).
But I recently came across an article by Rosemary Joyce that adds some very welcome nuance to my understanding of these words. She makes several interesting points, which I summarize here in no particular order. 1.) Despite the commonly held view that ‘provenience’ is an Americanism for provenance, its use in an archaeological context is first attested in Britain. 2.) Although provenance seems to be more common term, based on searches in JSTOR both are used more or less equally. 3.) For geologists, provenance refers to where the materials that comprise a sample originated, whereas provenience simply refers to where the sample was collected. 4.) In Joyce’s view, provenience refers to a specific point within an object’s provenance, and it is not always the most interesting or important point.
I have always eschewed the term provenience in favor of provenance, which I use in its most general sense. Joyce’s paper seems to justify this usage. She suggests dispensing with both terms in favor of such things as ‘object itineraries,’ but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
The article, which I highly recommend, is R. Joyce, “From Place to Place: Provenience, Provenance, and Archaeology,” in G. Feigenbaum and I. Reist (ed.), Provenance: An Alternate History of Art (Getty Research Institute, 2012), 48-60.