The World Wide Web is now deeply intertwined with our lives, and has become a catalyst for a data deluge, making vast amounts of data available online, at a click of a button. With Web 2.0, users are no longer passive consumers, but active publishers and curators of data. Hence, from science to food manufacturing, from data journalism to personal well-being, from social media to art, there is a strong interest in provenance, a description of what influenced an artifact, a data set, a document, a blog, or any resource on the Web and beyond. Provenance is a crucial piece of information that can help a consumer make a judgment as to whether something can be trusted. Provenance is no longer seen as a curiosity in art circles, but it is regarded as pragmatically, ethically, and methodologically crucial for our day-to-day data manipulation and curation activities on the Web. Following the recent publication of the PROV standard for provenance on the Web, which the two authors actively help shape in the Provenance Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium, this Synthesis lecture is a hands-on introduction to PROV aimed at Web and linked data professionals. By means of recipes, illustrations, a website at www.provbook.org, and tools, it guides practitioners through a variety of issues related to provenance: how to generate provenance, publish it on the Web, make it discoverable, and how to utilize it. Equipped with this knowledge, practictioners will be in a position to develop novel applications that can bring open-ness, trust, and accountability. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / A Data Journalism Scenario / The PROV Ontology / Provenance Recipes / Validation, Compliance, Quality, Replay / Provenance Management / Conclusion / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index

For the last 180 years, scientists have been attempting to determine the 'provenance' (geological source) of the copper used in Bronze Age artefacts. However, despite advances in analytical technologies, the theoretical approach has remained virtually unchanged over this period, with the interpretative methodology only changing to accommodate the increasing capacity of computers. This book represents a concerted effort to think about the composition of Bronze Age metal as the product of human intentionality as well as of geology. It considers the trace element composition of the metal, the alloying elements, and the lead isotopic composition, showing how a combination of these aspects, along with archaeological context and typology, can reveal much more about the life history of such artefacts, expanding considerably upon the rather limited ambition of knowing where the ore was extracted.

"This volume of essays offers new arguments regarding the significance of the social biography of art and the transformative power of ownership. It realigns the traditional art-historical paradigm that focuses on the moment of an object's origin and instead considers the longue durée of ownership. Whereas the term provenance may call to mind little more than a list of owners or the legal questions raised by competing entitlement claims, the essays in this book demonstrate that a nuanced approach recuperates important, even dramatic, aspects of the history of art. The authors present a broad perspective on provenance, investigating examples from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and from ancient archaeology to conceptual art. They explore how stories of ownership are attached to objects, analyze important distinctions between provenance and provenience, and show how provenance can be monetized, politicized, suppressed, or otherwise instrumentalized."--Page 4 of cover.

This book attempts to articulate the nature of a secular society, describe its benefits, and suggests the conditions under which such a society could emerge. To become secular, argues Fenn, is to open oneself and one's society to a wide range of possibilities, some interesting and exciting, some burdensome and dreadful. While some sociologists have argued that a "Civil Religion" is necessary to hold together our newly "religionless" society, Fenn urges that there is nothing to fear--and everything to gain--from living in a society that is not bound together by sacred memories and beliefs, or by sacred institutions and practices.

An ambitious young woman has just one chance to secure her future and reclaim her family's priceless lost artifacts in this stand-alone novel set in the world of the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Imperial Radch trilogy. Though she knows her brother holds her mother's favor, Ingrid is determined to at least be considered as heir to the family name. She hatches an audacious plan -- free a thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned, and use them to help steal back a priceless artifact. But Ingray and her charge return to her home to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future and her world, before they are lost to her for good.

A tautly paced investigation of one the 20th century's most audacious art frauds, which generated hundreds of forgeries-many of them still hanging in prominent museums and private collections today Provenance is the extraordinary narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate deceptions in art history. Investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo brilliantly recount the tale of a great con man and unforgettable villain, John Drewe, and his sometimes unwitting accomplices. Chief among those was the struggling artist John Myatt, a vulnerable single father who was manipulated by Drewe into becoming a prolific art forger. Once Myatt had painted the pieces, the real fraud began. Drewe managed to infiltrate the archives of the upper echelons of the British art world in order to fake the provenance of Myatt's forged pieces, hoping to irrevocably legitimize the fakes while effectively rewriting art history. The story stretches from London to Paris to New York, from tony Manhattan art galleries to the esteemed Giacometti and Dubuffet associations, to the archives at the Tate Gallery. This enormous swindle resulted in the introduction of at least two hundred forged paintings, some of them breathtakingly good and most of them selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of these fakes are still out in the world, considered genuine and hung prominently in private houses, large galleries, and prestigious museums. And the sacred archives, undermined by John Drewe, remain tainted to this day. Provenance reads like a well-plotted thriller, filled with unforgettable characters and told at a breakneck pace. But this is most certainly not fiction; Provenance is the meticulously researched and captivating account of one of the greatest cons in the history of art forgery.

After decades of operating off-the-backfoot and protecting and conserving nature perceived as under threat, conservationists are becoming proactive and creative in the face of habitat loss, agricultural intensification and climate change. Beyond Conservation offers a revolutionary agenda for both managing existing wildlands in Britain and for expanding and connecting such lands. Central to this strategy is the imperative to 'rewild' or restore and repair damaged habitat and ecosystems, promote existing biodiversity and reintroduce vanished plant and animal species, while working to reconcile human needs and livelihoods and the needs of nature.

The study of provenance—the history of the creation and ownership of an artefact, work of art, or specimen—provides insights into the history of taste and collecting, illuminating the social, economic, and historic trends in which an object was created and collected. It is as much a history of people as it is of objects, and its study often reveals intricate networks of relationships, patterns of activity and motivations. This book promotes the study of the history of collecting and collections in all their variety through the lens of provenance, and explores the subject as a cross-disciplinary activity. Perhaps for the first time in a publication, it draws on expertise ranging from art history and anthropology, to natural history and law, looking at periods from antiquity through the 18th century and the Holocaust era to the present, and materials from Europe and the Americas to China and the Pacific. The issues raised are wide-ranging, touching on aspects of authenticity, cultural meaning and material transformation and economic and commercial drivers, as well as collector and object biography. The book fills a gap in the study of collecting and provenance, taking the subject holistically and from multiple standpoints, better to reflect the widening interest in provenance from a range of disciplinary perspectives. This book will be a service to the field, from established scholars and museum professionals to students of collecting history, cultural heritage, and museum studies.

Dominic McIver Lopes articulates and defends a 'buck passing theory of art', namely that a work of art is nothing but a work in one of the arts. Having traced philosophical interest in theories of art to a reaction to certain puzzle cases of avant-garde art, he argues that none of the theories that have dominated philosophy since the 1960s adequately copes with these works. Whereas these theories have reached a dialectical impasse wherein they reiterate, and cannot resolve, disagreement over the puzzle cases, the buck passing theory illuminates the radical provocations of avant-garde art. In addition, when supplemented by a systematic framework for crafting theories of the individual arts, the buck passing theory grounds our empirical inquiries into the arts as well as our practices of appreciation and art criticism. Lopes seeks to model the diverse strategies employed by humanists and social and behavioural scientists who study the different arts. He gives the specificity of each art form a central role in our appreciative endeavours, and yet he stresses the continuity of the arts with similar, non-art activities such as fashion design, sports and games, cuisine, nature appreciation, and non-literary writing.

The first edition appeared fourteen years ago. Since then there have been significant advances in our science that warrant an updating and revision of Sand and Sandstone. The main framework of the first edition has been retained so that the reader can begin with the mineralogy and textural properties of sands and sandstones, progress through their organization and classification and their study as a body of rock, to consideration of their origin-prove nance, transportation, deposition, and lithification-and finally to their place in the stratigraphic column and the basin. The last decade has seen the rise of facies analysis based on a closer look at the stratigraphic record and the recognition of characteristic bed ding sequences that are the signatures of some geologic process-such as a prograding shallow-water delta or the migration of a point bar on an alluvial floodplain. The environment of sand deposition is more closely determined by its place in such depositional systems than by criteria based on textural characteristics-the "fingerprint" approach. Our revi sion reflects this change in thinking. As in the geological sciences as a whole, the concept of plate tectonics has required a rethinking of our older ideas about the origin and accumu lation of sediments-especially the nature of the sedimentary basins.