Making the Unaccountable Accountable: Reflections on Provenance Research Around Unaccessioned and Unprovenanced Objects

This article describes and analyses the challenges and rewards of conducting provenance research on poorly documented and unaccessioned museum objects. It draws on research carried out by the author on uncatalogued objects associated with collections from Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Indigenous Americas as part of the British Museum’s Blythe House decant project (2019-2024), a major storage move which entailed the relocation of more than 1.5 million objects. One of the project aims consisted in establishing museum ownership for unaccessioned objects stored at Blythe House through provenance research. However, what emerged in the process was the complexity and the number of challenges associated with undertaking provenance research on a large volume of unaccessioned material (numbering over 5,000 objects for objects of African and Oceanic origin for example). The significant volume and diversity of material – and the length of time and resources it took to process it – necessitated a consistent and systematic approach to ensure due diligence, transparency and accountability. This article therefore disseminates the strategies I developed to streamline the provenance research process for thousands of objects. This included devising priority checklists for archival research, standardising the recording of due diligence checks, flagging objects linked to colonial collecting contexts and ensuring that research outcomes remain accessible to museum staff and the public. The article details how historical documentation found on unaccessioned objects revealed important leads for archival research. Case studies of objects of African and Oceanic origin showcase how looking beyond legal ownership in provenance research can highlight nineteenth- and twentieth-century collecting histories, patterns and acquisition contexts (including duplicate exchange practices) hitherto buried in museum archives. It provides practical examples of navigating provenance research in a large institution with complex archives, responding to dead ends in research and the importance of acknowledging curatorial knowledge and time constraints. Finally, by reflecting on the theme of failure in the archives, the paper responds to calls to ‘draw back the curtain’ (Schuhmacher 2024, p. 68) on provenance research as a museum practice.