Bag Inventory and Provenience Tracking for Field Archaeology

Provenience is the single most important attribute of an artifact, and the easiest one to lose. A bag with intact contents but missing provenience is, for archaeological purposes, dirt. The discipline of maintaining provenience from excavation through lab processing, analysis, and curation is one of the things that separates rigorous CRM work from shortcuts.

This guide walks through the bag inventory and provenience workflow that holds up under permitting agency review, and where digital tooling makes the difference.

What "provenience" actually means

Provenience is the spatial and stratigraphic context of an artifact at the moment of recovery. At minimum:

Site number
Excavation unit / shovel test pit number
Level (depth or stratigraphic context)
Quadrant or feature, if applicable
Recovery method (screened, point-located, surface collection)
Date and recorder

Provenience also includes the bag — the unique identifier that links the physical container of artifacts back to a specific provenience record.

The four points of failure

Provenience gets lost at four predictable points:

Field bagging. Bag tags written in pencil, on paper that gets wet. Or bags labeled inconsistently between crew members.
Field-to-lab transit. Bags shifted between containers, labels separated from contents.
Lab inventory. Bags processed without checking against the field inventory; partial bags merged or split.
Curation transfer. Catalog numbers assigned without provenience cross-reference; bags arriving at the curation facility without a manifest.

Every one of these is preventable.

The bag inventory discipline that works

The pattern that survives review:

In the field

Every bag gets a unique ID at the moment of bagging. Site + unit + level + sequence (e.g., CA-FRE-1234-N100E50-L3-001). The sequence number prevents duplicate IDs when multiple bags come from the same level.
Bag tags use Tyvek or polypropylene labels written in permanent marker, not paper. Paper labels degrade in transit and curation.
Bag information is recorded twice — once on the tag, once in the field record system. The field record is the authoritative inventory.
The bag is photographed at closing with the tag visible, tied to the provenience record.

Field-to-lab transit

A field bag manifest (auto-generated from the field record system) accompanies every shipment of bags to the lab.
Bags are checked off the manifest at intake. Any discrepancy is reconciled before processing begins.
Bags are stored with the manifest in physical proximity until check-in is complete.

Lab inventory

Each bag is reconciled against the field record at intake — unique ID matches, weight matches if recorded, contents match the field description.
Catalog numbers are assigned and cross-referenced to the original bag ID. The bag ID is never lost; the catalog number is added, not substituted.
Lab notes are tied to the original provenience record, so the field record always shows the current lab status of every bag.

Curation

Final catalog numbers, lab notes, and original provenience are exported as a curation manifest.
The manifest is delivered to the curation facility, signed off, and a copy retained.

Where firms still lose bags

The recurring failure modes:

Crews using inconsistent bag labels. A new crew member writes "TU2-L3-1" while everyone else writes "Test Unit 2, Level 3, Bag 1." Both refer to the same provenience but neither sorts cleanly in inventory.
Provenience recorded in the field notebook but not in the digital record. When the notebook gets soaked or lost, the provenience is gone.
Lab merging multiple field bags into one analytical bag without preserving the original IDs. Aggregation is fine; loss of the original provenience link is not.

Where digital tooling helps

The bag inventory problem maps cleanly to a digital field workflow:

Bag IDs are auto-generated from the unit + level + sequence, eliminating typos and inconsistency
Each bag gets a record at bagging time with provenience automatically populated from the parent unit/level record
A photo of the bag with tag visible is automatically tied to the bag record
The field manifest is generated automatically at end of day, ready to ship with the bags
Lab status updates flow back into the same record, so the project PI can always see which bags are processed and which are pending

Tools purpose-built for archaeology (FieldTap, Wildnote) ship with this kind of provenience-aware data model. Generic data collection tools (Fulcrum, Survey123) need to be configured for it. See the Section 106 software comparison for how the major tools handle provenience data.

What permit agencies look for

In our work with firms operating on federal land permits (BLM, USFS, NPS) and state-permitted projects:

A complete field bag manifest with provenience for every bag
Photographs of bags with tags visible
A reconciled lab intake log
A curation-ready manifest with both field and catalog identifiers
Chain-of-custody documentation for every transfer

The firms that pass agency review without revisions are the firms whose digital field record system produces these deliverables as exports, not as separate products to be assembled later.

Related guides

If your firm's bag inventory is currently a spreadsheet that someone updates manually after fieldwork, the workflow above is what FieldTap was built for. Start a free 30-day trial.