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According to the International Council of Museums code of ethics, provenance research is at the core of collection research and management (esp. §2.3). Indeed, provenance research plays a pivotal role in museums, ensuring the authenticity and ethical and legal acquisition of their collections. Moreover, understanding more comprehensively the history and ownership of heritage objects and artworks allows to develop more diverse and interesting narratives around these objects in question.

However, with the exponentially growing art and antiquities market during the last century, provenance of art and heritage objects has also become highly uncertain and problematic. Ethically unclear and legally problematic provenances have become a common thing in the heritage market and in museum collections around the world, including in Finland. At the same time, it has become increasingly unclear how museums are actually responding to this urgency through provenance research.

Hence, working with cultural heritage (artworks, artefacts, manuscripts) entails more than only knowledge of the material at hand. It requires also awareness of the legal and ethical framework surrounding the governance, movement, and use of cultural heritage, and the practicalities associated with it.

In this course, students will learn to:

Explain the general workings of the global art and heritage market, its legal and ethical problems, and the role of provenance.
Justify the importance of provenance research of cultural heritage by applying legislation, conventions and ethical codes, as well as academic arguments.
Investigate the provenance of an object and to produce a provenance report based on best practices in the field.

Target audience

The course is targeted to advanced students across a wide variety of disciplines that engage with cultural heritage (museology, archaeology, art history, ethnology, folkloristics, but also history, classics, ancient near eastern studies, biblical studies), but also to museum professionals, particularly those working with collections.

This course has been taught every other year since 2018. It originally started as more theoretical, awareness-raising course, but the current aim is to add a more practice-oriented focus, providing hands-on experiences and best-practices in the field. To my knowledge, this is the only course of its kind taught in Finland.

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Material Culture in Antiquity, study module

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