If buying looted antiquities is a form of white-collar crime, and if understanding white-collar crime is in some measure about identifying ways that people use narrative to ‘explain away’ offending, then questions of narrative seem to provide a useful bridge across the three themes of this workshop: crime, networks (including object biographies) and contested histories.

Narrative can be simple post-hoc justification of white-collar crime, but it can also be constitutive: in other words, the stories we tell ourselves about what is happening shape what we choose to believe, and consequently what we choose to do. Those stories are part of wider narrative fabrics in society, and the antiquities market has such an identifiable narrative fabric, which we will explore. Often the stories we are concerned with manifest as fiction about the provenance histories of particular artefacts, but I will argue that we can discern such evidential lies as frequently tied to wider and more generic market narratives.

We will look at some of the things that dealers and collectors say, as a method for thinking about those market narratives. Through these stories we can identify the social construction of a particular type of market reality: capitalist, colonial, competitive and consumeristic, but also on some views philanthropic, educative, cultured and heroic. We will think about how particular narrative devices support wrongdoing, and how they fit with other classic perspectives in the study of white-collar crime like the normalisation of deviance; the manipulation of moral accounts; the ethically-neutralising effects of rationalisations, justifications, and excuses; and the sociology of denial. These theoretical frameworks help us to see that the overall problem of looted antiquities and provenance is comprised of features that are common in white-collar crime: power, profit, exploitation, vested interests, and entrenched routine.

In conclusion we can ask: if narrative is part of the problem of how the market engages with provenance, can it perhaps also be part of the solution?

This paper uses the Douglas Latchford case to examine provenance not only as a record of ownership, but as a mechanism through which looted cultural objects can be laundered into legal, ethical, and scholarly legitimacy. For decades, Latchford sat at the center of the global trade in Khmer antiquities, linking objects stolen from Cambodian temples to dealers, collectors, auction houses, museums, and scholars—connections later exposed through criminal investigations, civil forfeiture actions, and repatriation proceedings. Focusing on this network, the paper asks how provenance narratives are produced, circulated, and institutionalized—and how critical provenance research can reconstruct the structures that made such legitimation possible.

Drawing on a developing network map of the Latchford case, the paper traces the relationships among objects, source sites, intermediaries, experts, institutions, documents, and legal filings. It identifies recurring mechanisms of provenance laundering, including corporate layering, reputable market pass-throughs, paid or conflicted expert opinion, false prior owners, and publication as provenance. The Latchford network shows that provenance is not merely something an object has; it can also be something market actors manufacture and exploit. By mapping these object biographies and information flows, the paper proposes a method for using provenance to reconstruct illicit trade networks and the power structures that legitimate contested cultural heritage.

This paper examines the biography of the Sendang Duwur manuscript, a Javanese manuscript copied in Batavia in 1930 by local scribes under the commission of a Dutch scholar and now housed in Leiden University Libraries. Rather than treating it as a self-contained textual object, I trace its biography across the sites, actors, and infrastructures that have shaped its production, circulation, preservation, and interpretation. Drawing on Ann Laura Stoler's notion of imperial debris, I ask what becomes visible when the manuscript is understood not simply as a repository of Javanese knowledge, but as a material remnant of colonial knowledge-making whose formation continues into the present. Approaching the manuscript as imperial debris shifts attention from its textual content to the enduring colonial relations embedded in its material existence and in the knowledge afterlives it continues to generate. I follow the manuscript from its copying in late-colonial Batavia and its incorporation into a Dutch archive to its translation, interpretation, and circulation within modern scholarship. Through Stoler's lens of ruination and ecologies of remains, I then turn back to Sendang Duwur itself to examine how scholarly knowledge produced through and around the manuscript might have shaped the preservation and understanding of the site as both an archaeological monument and a living religious landscape. By tracing the manuscript's biography beyond the archive to the institutions, places, and people implicated in its making and afterlives, I argue that manuscripts are not passive witnesses to colonial history. Rather, they materialise the enduring debris of empire, revealing how imperial durabilities continue to reshape archival authority, heritage practices, and the production of historical knowledge.

Using a multidisciplinary, object-based framework of object biography and provenance research, I am examining the reliability of evidence, market dynamics, provenance, and the ethics of public display related to a set of Levantine Neolithic (7500-6000 BCE) masks. Of the eighteen masks known worldwide, four have associated archaeological findspots, although the information surrounding the circumstances of their recovery often lacks crucial details. Three are in institutional collections, the result of direct sales between the looter and the buyer, often relying on oral histories or hearsay for findspot information. The remaining eleven masks were all sold in the antiquities market with little or no background information. Scientific analyses have placed the geochemical signatures of some of the masks from sites in the territory of Palestine. Hearsay also traces the origin stories for a few of the masks to Palestine, yet they have only been displayed in Israel. By focusing on provenance, this study will contribute additional insights into the hidden histories of these Neolithic masks, potentially addressing questions of authenticity and the museum as a locus of ongoing bias and inequality in the public display of objects.

Drawing on a developing network map of the Latchford case, the paper traces the relationships among objects, source sites, intermediaries, experts, institutions, documents, and legal filings. It identifies recurring mechanisms of provenance laundering, including corporate layering, reputable market pass-throughs, paid or conflicted expert opinion, false prior owners, and publication as provenance. The Latchford network shows that provenance is not merely something an object has; it can also be something market actors manufacture and exploit. By mapping these object biographies and information flows, the paper proposes a method for using provenance to reconstruct illicit trade networks and the power structures that legitimate contested cultural heritage.

Inspired by the famous organigram diagram of the Italian antiquities trade drawn by antiquities dealer Pasquale Camera, a few years ago Donna Yates and I embarked on a project to map the chains of connections across a number of historic case studies of aspects of the antiquities trade. This was more than a network analysis however; we mapped statements-of-fact about who did what to whom, of who sold what to whom, and so on, knitting together a ‘knowledge graph’ representing that state of knowledge. We then used a technique first developed in the field of machine translation to represent all of the actors, organizations, and objects within a multi-dimensional space, where proximity implies some sort of connection, some kind of similarity (in the same way that in geographic space, lists of coordinates of places can be mathematically manipulated to surface implied knowledge not formally listed, ie ‘Ottawa’ and ‘Rome’ have significantly different climates). In this talk, I take you through how the very process of moving from knowledge graph to embedding space affects what kinds of implied knowledge can be discovered in the latent spaces of what we know.

During Japan’s occupation of Korea (1910–1945), colonial authorities systematically looted Korean cultural heritage as part of a broader project of cultural genocide and epistemic control. Among the most significant losses were the Joseon Uigwe (Records of Royal Protocol), detailed documentary records of state rites and major projects, from royal weddings and investitures to funerals, weapons production, and palace construction. After their removal from Korea, the Uigwe effectively vanished from the archival record, becoming part of the vast body of “lost” heritage produced through colonial plunder.

After World War II, Allied authorities required Japan to provide reparations, including the return of looted cultural property. This process was formalized for South Korea in the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations Between Japan and the Republic of Korea, which tasked the governments with compiling an official list of artifacts for repatriation. Of the 4,479 items requested by South Korea, Japan returned 1,437; yet the Uigwe were absent from both the requests and returns lists. The volumes did not reappear until 2001, long after Korea’s right to further reparations had been waived.

This paper retraces the provenance of the plundered Uigwe to identify when and why they disappeared from colonial records, and how that disappearance enabled their exemption from legal mechanisms of postcolonial return. I argue that gaps in provenance are not merely evidentiary failures but can be actively manufactured through archival omission and redaction as a strategy to preserve ownership, access, and control of loot in the hands powerful institutions and individuals. In this way, provenance gaps work to make dispossession durable.

While provenance can still be considered an emerging field of study for multiple sectors intersecting with cultural heritage, it oscillates between being considered common practice and being seen as an inconvenient necessity or imposition to owners. The perspective of provenance research being something forced upon institutions as a form of accountability from the outside, rather than being seen as an intrinsic benefit to the institution, makes for a difficult relationship with scholarship, since the same institutions are also the primary record-keepers of materials required for provenance research. This strained playing field is exacerbated by the role that auction houses play in the continued circulation and curation of «antiquities», centering collectibility and categorizing objects with an art-historical lens that can feel removed from ongoing heritage scholarship.

The “red thread” of provenance from initial discovery in and extraction from its region of origin, to the hands it passed through on its way to its current owner or custodian, and its treatment since, has arguably never been more important than now, when institutions are making decisions regarding the digitization of their holdings that deeply affect, and at worst strongly limit or otherwise negatively impact, the findability and usability of the records being put online. Lacking provenance is no longer a good look, and with higher visibility thanks to online collections and with increased competition for resources in the cultural sector, public goodwill only extends so far once negative associations have been made.

This talk touches upon avenues towards getting institutions on board with provenance proactively rather than treating it – and conducting research – reactively or defensively. Using examples of impacts to reputation, finances, scholarship, and conservation, directly caused or strongly related to provenance, it provides arguments for ways in which researchers can present tangible benefits to collection caretakers and owners. Rounding out the talk is an illustration of the speaker’s ongoing work on the distribution of papyri, based on a growing dataset of papyrus-holding institutions world-wide, and the promise that improved provenance research holds for «joins» between papyrus fragments scattered across numerous different institutions.

The C.I. 44 is a one-page form that documents individuals of Chinese origin or descent in Canada, who were required to register under section 18 of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. These were once restricted historical government records. In 2021, after extensive work from June Chow (Chinese Canadian Archivist) and the Chinese Canadian community, the records were given public access. Using this as a case study, I will examine the relationship between custody, access, and provenance of Chinese Canadian Records at the Library and Archives Canada.

It is vital for the sovereignty, self-determination, and well-being of Indigenous peoples and communities that they maintain access to, and ownership and control over, their material culture, knowledge, and stories. In addition to cultural belongings commonly found in museums and galleries, this knowledge is also stored in the collections of archives and libraries, contained in documentary forms such as books, manuscripts, photographs, and audiovisual recordings. Much of this important material, extracted from communities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by settler researchers and collectors, remains housed in Canadian government, academic, and religious institutions without the awareness or consent of their communities of origin. Increasingly, frameworks such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the First Nations Principles of OCAP have encouraged communities to move beyond seeking improved access and description of these materials to calls for their physical return, especially when they contain traditional knowledge that document sacred cultural practices, support language revitalization, or reconnect with ancestors. However, repatriation efforts can be stymied by friction with the centuries-old principle of provenance, a normative set of ideas and practices that have specific meanings for archivists. The principle of provenance, and related concepts such as respect des fonds and the archival bond, centre records creators - for example, a settler anthropologist or book collector - over the communities or individuals documented in those records, and align with custodial models for stewardship that demand that the archival bonds between records, and the institution itself, remain inviolable. This paper interrogates the conflicts between archival understandings of provenance and physical return. By putting frameworks for the repatriation of Indigenous knowledge in conversation with a flourishing of recent scholarship on alternative interpretations of provenance, I seek to clear conceptual pathways for archivists and librarians that support journeys towards repatriation.