Provenance
Where did the answer come from?
A method can remain useful long after the circumstances that produced it have been forgotten. In Provenance, Roscoe follows operational rules, forms, examples, and copied evidence as they travel between people, regions, and institutions. The results often still work. The harder question is what each result actually proves.
A local judgment becomes guidance. Guidance becomes a template. A number written in one person’s notebook appears later in a document written for someone else. Roscoe’s investigation turns toward source, context, and the difference between evidence that belongs to a place and evidence that has merely arrived there.
Provenance asks what responsibility looks like when nobody has falsified anything and the chain of inheritance is visible only after someone chooses to trace it. The problem is not whether a method is true. It is knowing what kind of truth it carries, where that truth began, and when the people using it have earned evidence of their own.