Different collections, different values?: the role of provenance in Gifts from the ancestors : ancient ivories of Bering Strait

The purpose of this paper is to understand why some of the objects that were part of the Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition Gifts From the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait have a provenance, while others do not. Because the objects are from the same general area, one would assume that provenance information for the ivory objects would be site specific and similar from collection to collection. This assumption, however, falls apart when considering the exhibition collection checklist because many objects have unidentified, unidentified/”said to be,” and “said to be” provenances, with much fewer objects showing a provenance related to a specific site, island/peninsula, or even region. The unidentified provenance objects alone make up more than half of the questionably provenanced objects in entire exhibition, leading to questions about the collecting practices of the museum and their benefactors. Using the exhibition as a case study, this analysis will address the politics of displaying and collecting objects of uncertain provenance, to determine whether different types of institutions and collections, aesthetic or ethnologic and private or public, value an object’s provenance differently and the effect this has on scholarship.M.A.Includes bibliographical referencesby Nicole T. DeAugustin