Provenance and historical warrants: histories of cataloguing at the Museum of Anthropology

Abstract

PurposeThis paper considers how knowledge has been organized about museum objects and belongings at the Museum of Anthropology, in what is now known as British Columbia, and proposes the concept of historical or provenance warrant to understand how cataloguing decisions were made and are limited by current museum systems.Design/methodology/approachThrough interviews and archival research, we trace how cataloguing was done at the museum through time and some of the challenges imposed by historical documentation systems.FindingsReading from the first attempts at standardizing object nomenclatures in the journals of private collectors to the contemporary practices associated with object documentation in the digital age, we posit that historic or provenance warrant is crafted through donor attribution or association, object naming, the concept of geo-cultural location and the imposition of unique identifiers, numbers and direct labels that physically mark belongings.Originality/valueThe ultimate goal and contribution of this research is to understand and describe the systems that structure and organize knowledge, in an effort to repair the history and terminologies moving forward.