Contamination as Provenance Marker

Production never begins from a blank slate. It draws on an ambient environment: physical inputs for steel, or an existing information ecosystem for text. When that environment changes widely enough, later artifacts may incorporate traces unavailable to earlier ones. Contamination then creates a boundary: not simply clean versus dirty, but before versus after. This is the broader logic behind anthropogenic-global-contamination and the value of a preserved baseline such as low-background-steel. The residue becomes useful because it records provenance.

A historical cutoff can tell you that contamination became possible; it does not, by itself, prove the origin of every individual artifact. Treating a date as conclusive attribution risks an unfalsifiable-provenance-claim. The model is strongest for defining populations and baselines, weaker for certifying a single sample without an independently testable signature.