Zur Frage der Provenienz

Abstract The question of provenance can have very different implications in different disciplines. In the case of archaeological objects, the finding spot of an object provides us with information about the objectʼs original meaning and function. If the excavation is illegal, those involved in illicit antiquities tend to cancel any trace of their action that could be used as proof of the crime. This leads to a systematic destruction of information: when the objects appear on the market they seem to come out of nowhere; it is exactly this loss of contextual information (and not the problem of ownership) that makes illegal excavation intolerable from a scholarly perspective. My test case is a Greek archaic statue acquired by the Berlin Museum in 1925: it had been heavily damaged in order to facilitate its smuggling out of Greece and then carefully restored in order to promote its acquisition by the museum.