Knowledge Notes
Occasional notes on calls, events, publications, and more that caught our attention.
Category: Museums
Provenance Research as History of Knowledge: Archaeological Finds from the Syrian-Turkish Border at the British Museum
Reviews the cases of Deve Hüyük, Tell Halaf, and Carchemish to underline that a better understanding of the genesis of collections makes it possible to explain the distribution of finds and to discern gaps in our knowledge about them.
Owning the (Deep) Past: Paleontological Knowledge and the Political Afterlives of Fossils
Who do fossils belong to? The question is far from new: in various guises, it has preoccupied paleoscientists, museum curators, and occasionally officials for many years, although ongoing debates about the decolonization of science and natural history collections have renewed its significance.
Provenance Research and Attribution Knowledge of Ancient Middle Eastern Art
Until the 1990s, provenance research, or the history of ownership, was mainly conducted to determine the attribution and authenticity of an artwork. Provenance research grew significantly after the Washington Principles of 1998 and the...
Louis Agassiz and the Classification of Brazil’s Fish
Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) was a young student at the University of Munich when Johann von Spix and Carl Friedrich von Martius returned from their expedition to Brazil. Among the many items and specimens the...
Provenance Research and Circulation: Examples from the Maximilian von Goldschmidt-Rothschild Collection
This is the final of three pieces on provenance research that we are publishing in conjunction with the 6th German/American Provenance Exchange Program (PREP) in Washington, DC. As art objects circulate over time, they...
Cranach’s ‘Johann’ and Art Historical Knowledge at the Met
This is the second of three pieces related to provenance research that we are publishing in conjunction with the 6th German/American Provenance Exchange Program (PREP) in Washington, DC. In 1908, The Metropolitan Museum of...
Tracking Entangled Provenances: Knowledge Production in Relation to Objects
We are publishing this article on provenance research in conjunction with the 6th German/American Provenance Exchange Program (PREP) in Washington, DC. Where is the object from? Who did it belong to? How did it...
Structuring Imperial Knowledge about India at the Great Exhibition of 1851
The Great Exhibition of 1851 excited curiosity in nineteenth-century contemporaries and continues to garner interest among scholars today. Attracting some six million visitors and comprising over 100,000 exhibits that filled 76,720 square meters of...
‘A Few Plain Instructions for Collecting’: Nineteenth-Century Botanical Collection Manuals in the Service of Empire
Writing in 1849 from their Admiralty chambers right off of Whitehall, the Lords Commissioners of the Royal Navy issued a simple memorandum to introduce their new Manual of Scientific Enquiry, a mutable collecting reference...
