A Historical Sketch on the Concepts of Archaeological Association, Context, and Provenience

Abstract

The archaeological concepts of association, context, and provenience have been known by archaeologists since the early nineteenth century, but the terms have not been used. Provenience is empirical and absolute; an association and a context are inferential and relative. These fundamental concepts have seldom been the subject of thoughtful discussion except when a particular association or context has implications far beyond the particular instance under study, such as in the context of considerations of claims for a pre-Clovis occupation of North America. Introductory archaeology textbooks published over the past 100 years do not always introduce the terms and sometimes fail to define them. Future discussion of the concepts should include several examples of what qualifies as evidence of an association or context, how the inference of an association or context was derived, and descriptions of analytical techniques used to determine if an inferred temporal association is valid.

Sets, Graphs, and Things We Can See: A Formal Combinatorial Ontology for Empirical Intra-Site Analysis

“…and assemblage may have connotations that differ from others' regional or topical usages. In general, the usages are consistent with the definitions found in Lyman (2012).…”

“…The remaining spatial entity in a site's ontology is provenience, which is both a unit of spatial location and (more importantly for the current discussion) a distinct and descriptive encapsulation of the data related to an individual excavated sample. While the concept of provenience is most commonly associated with its spatial connotation (e.g., Aldenderfer 1998;Ammerman 1992;Carr 1984;Hietala & Stevens 1977;Kintigh 1990;Koetje 1991;Lyman 2012;McCoy & Ladefoged 2009;Schiffer 1983), the latter connotation as a specific sample from a site and context proves more analytically useful for this methodology.…”

Location and Position in Archaeology: Revisiting the Original Association of a Folsom Point with Bison Ribs

“…Significantly for the history of North American archaeology, confirmation of such a suggestion is not critical to the argument that people and the extinct form of bison were contemporaries. That several professional archaeologists with lots of field experience were deemed necessary to declare the association a valid indication of what we now refer to as Paleoindians hints at something of the art of interpreting archaeological associations and contexts (Haynes and Stanford 1984;Lyman 2012). Archaeological field methods have improved significantly and become increasingly formalized (consistent from investigator to investigator) over the past 90 years, and so too have techniques for evaluating the field evidence concerning contexts and associations (Lyman 2012;Meltzer 2005).…”

“Still covered in sand.looked very old.”—Legal Obligations in the Internet Market for Antiquities

“…Antiquities that offered high-quality provenance were presented by the dealers with information that could serve as legal testimony for the object in a contemporary legal context. Such information includes an object's provenience-"the physical location of an artifact in four-dimensional space", which is "empirical and absolute" [26] (p. 212)-or records of a legal export from the source country to its destination. On the other end of the spectrum, low-quality provenance was regarded as incomplete or insufficient provenance information.…”