Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

New sourcing techniques and integrative GIS studies have reinvigorated interest in identifying where artifacts were produced, i.e. their "provenance." The theoretical basis for provenance studies must expand apace with new investigations and acquisition of "big data"-scale information, and the time is ripe to review methodological and interpretive frameworks. Methods to identify imported goods have occupied the archaeological imagination for decades, but a significantly undertheorized problem in provenance studies concerns the recognition and interpretation of "local" goods. Frequently cast in binary opposition to trade items, local products have been identified in myriad ways. Papers in this symposium identify local products and review prevailing interpretive models to address the question "where is provenance" by first answering "what is local?" Do we recognize local products by identifying connections to local raw materials, local technological traditions and practices, and/or the intersection of these lines of evidence? Can local products be recognized through simple numerical abundance? What do we consider local, from a geographic perspective, when interpreting provenance data gathered at different scales? What bridging arguments can we create to link the identification of local products to past social processes and interactions? We bring together researchers from different world areas to critically review this topic.