Trying to relax with a junk murder mystery but noooo, #provenance strikes again

Next week is the anniversary and we were so lucky but it’s still so, so bleak. The scar is green but the scar is always there. The twisted black stumps, the miles of bare, pale earth scraped down. The ash pockets still clinging in broken paint, walls, gutters.

This copy had a long life of use, as evidenced by thick drops of candle wax and repairs throughout, often made by gluing pieces of medieval manuscripts over tears. Full leaves of prayers were also added in during the 16th and 17th centuries. 7/8

A thread of provenances and the stories they inspire (or were inspired by…)

Iykyk

Need inspiration for your Saturnalia parties? 🥂 Villa curator Judith is here to help! 🏺 Thirsty for more information on these drinking vessels? Dive into this thread to learn more. ⬇️ #museumfinds #homegoodsfinds

📣 Freelance opportunity! We're seeking to engage an experienced provenance researcher to conduct a detailed provenance and restitution investigation into the St Lambrecht collection, currently held at the FCDO archive. Find out more and apply🔗

Fraudsters are using AI chatbots to forge sales invoices and other documents to fake artwork authenticity and ownership, industry figures say, threatening provenance checks and prompting calls for forensic analysis, AI detection tools and stronger seller verification.

love to once again work in a museum and learn nothing from what’s on the walls 😭

A nature photographer stumbled upon thousands of 210-million-year-old dinosaur tracks in Italy's central Alps, near where some Olympic skiing and snowboarding events will be held in February. n.pr/48Xfbm3

Look closely at a collection of old-fashioned Italian and German menorahs, and you’ll find a figure no longer mentioned in today’s Hanukkah story: a lone woman with a knife. She is Judith, the OG Jewish badass lady who was once commonly celebrated alongside the Maccabees.

Every December, thousands of well-known and emerging artists from around the world scale down their work on three-by-three inch Post-it notes and display them at Giant Robot 2 in Sawtelle. The full story: lataco.com/giant-robot-... By @marinamasako.bsky.social

11. Week 2: ⏲️📍For all things provenance, join Dr David Pearson in 'Provenance in Books' Find out more about the course here: buff.ly/i1xRhYJ

Hey, Australians, if you want to do something that will help right now (and you physically and legally can): go give blood www.lifeblood.com.au/donors/blood...

They’re not on here, but had to bring this over to share from the MFAH, with a beautiful object biography: www.instagram.com/reel/DSQFb4o...

One of the most iconic early discoveries of human origins is the skull from Kabwe, now thought to be around 300,000 years old. The human story behind the site, with its legacy of industrial lead contamination, is not often told with the paleoanthropological one. www.johnhawks.net/p/kabwe-famo...

Kees Scherer - Relief at a Ptolemaic Temple Egypt, 1968 🏺

Hey 🏺colleagues working in SW Asia: I am searching for contacts to museums with prehistory on display in the region, and struggle to find some online. Who could help me with contacts to the Iraq National Museum, Lebanon National Museum, and/or National Museums in Syria?

This is just mandatory training every year now. You go and sit and think about escape routes while they show a slide about makeshift tourniquets. The first time a sniper was nearby I was a toddler. The next was high school. It’s grueling and terrible and my heart breaks for everyone at Brown.

Provenance matters: sports edition

🎉 Proud to announce that the Polish Provenance Database (PPD) has launched! Focused on post-1500 books in Polish collections, it’s a collaboration of 17 libraries & CERL, led by the University Library of Warsaw. Work and testing of PPD in progress. Search PPD: data.cerl.org/polish-prove... 👏

7/ The site became exceptional with the 2021 discovery of an unprecedented ritual deposit. Behind anthropomorphic carved stelae (one 1.12 m tall), archaeologists found 150 perfectly arranged fossils : ammonites and nautiluses. Finally, some marine inverts !

I keep seeing gift guides for kids that have nary a single book on them for the holidays and frankly this pattern is sobering and maddening: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/u...

Rubbing of an ancient Egyptian door jamb (vertical part of a door frame) made by Chinese diplomat and antiquarian Duanfang in AD 1912 #AdoorableThursday His rubbings provide a window not just into the cultural history of Egypt, but of China as well. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

by the time you are in your late 30s you will have received 110 mailers from former employers, old bank accounts, and a laser tag joint about a banking details breach but don’t worry they are sure nothing nefarious has happened

MoMA PS1, New York, has announced that entry will be free for all visitors for the next three years starting 1 January 2026 artreview.com/moma-ps1-ent...

Lots of gloomy education posts but yesterday I got spend a couple of hours hearing students report on provenance research they were conducting on objects from all over the world and it was so lovely! Thoughtful, smart, curious. So proud of their work and so appreciative of them sharing it.

Teaching students to read auction catalogues, for the MA Art & Business today @courtauld.bsky.social They hunted for annotations and compared frontispiece - so satisfying to be able to pour over the primary sources for a hands on session! At senate house library

I loved working in ILL but unwinding bad citations turned into mystery requests took tremendous effort ten years ago- can’t even imagine it now. Huge respect for the library teams facing this, and a great deal of sympathy for users who have been given horrible tools with no guidance.

"A specific risk is that generative AI tools always produce an answer, even when the historical sources are incomplete or silent. ... If you received an archival reference or document description from an AI chatbot, please keep in mind that it may be inaccurate."

📢 Das 4. Quartalstreffen des #NFDI4Objects CC Digitale #Provenienzforschung findet am 11.12.2025, 13 Uhr, statt! 🎯 Im Fokus: Ein Bericht über die Forschungen zum Berliner Münz- und Antikenhändler Philipp Lederer. 🌍 Alle Infos: www.nfdi4objects.net/news/n4o_new... #NFDI #NFDIrocks #FDM

I realize the Eagles are technically losing but the streets of Santa Monica and one local Roman villa have been alive with the sound of “go birds!” all weekend and I think that’s great

“In my career, I have seen children with hepatitis B. I’ve seen children die of liver failure, which is a horrible death. I would never wish this on anybody,” say Yvonne Maldonado, Stanford pediatrician. These risks have now increased under the new ACIP vaccine vote today. More @sciam.bsky.social:

Ongoing #provenance webinar series: www.khi.uni-bonn.de/fpk/de/nachr...

Just made OA, the rich photo collection of Fahreddin (Türkkan) Pasha (1868-1948) also offers a glimpse into monuments protected under the Ottoman legislation on antiquities. Here, the Comnenian fortification walls in Trebizond/Trabzon/Trapezounta. #MMARe #MSCA #HistoryOfArchaeology #ircica

#EquipCRAIUB 🗣️ 📆 13/11 | Participació de Laia Navarro i Marina Ruiz, del #CRAIFonsAntic de la @ub.edu , en el V Seminar on Book Provenance. 🗣️ Van presentar: “Cataloguing and disseminating provenance at the University of Barcelona’s Rare Book and Manuscript CRAI Library”. ➕ℹ️  https://ja.cat/fGlUS

Consider the following before adopting a Manticore for your family

SEASONAL GREETINGS, EARTHLINGS shop.getty.edu/collections/...

For holidaye giftes, try CURATED BOOK BUNDLES from the amazinge THE LAST BOOKSTORE yn legendarye Los Angeles: "Pick a budget, choose your categories — we’ll handpick and ship a bundle based on what you love (or what someone you love, loves)." www.lastbookstorela.com/shop-book-bu...

Upcoming webinar: “AABA | Tracing Forgotten Histories: Identifying Unprovenienced Human Skeletal Remains and Establishing Best Practices for their Ethical Treatment” #provenance burkinc.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

stunning new #OpenAccess article by Mauro Puddu and Peter van Dommelen on "Subaltern Identities in Punic and Roman Sardinia" - a sensitive and expansive decolonial approach to rural landscape www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

“If every single eligible person donated blood at least once a year, we would not have blood shortages in this country." www.vox.com/future-perfe...

Read the Invention of Love my senior year of high school- one of the first ways I understood how Latin can still be living, still a way to understand the modern lives of those who love it. D.m. to a beautiful writer.

I know about book breaking but had no idea that fragment breaking was a thing. A martyrology leaf offered recently by a respected dealer is now offered on eBay, having been recently (within the past 2 months) sliced in half. The other half has gone missing. *angry sigh* Caveat emptor fragmentorum.

FINAL REVEAL: A brand new Benin bronze plaque, titled "Looting of the Oba's Palace in 1897". This #newarrival confronts the theft of works from Benin in 1897. It shows what the palace altar looked like before 1897 (left), and British soldiers in the act of looting (right).

for your consideration: Thanksgiving tahdig and fesenjen (I am a genius)

Another day of senseless and horrifying news too close to home. Hug your family, hug your friends.