The counters beneath the stage

An original explanation of an invented record-checking exercise.

During repairs to an old meeting room, volunteers found a cloth bag beneath the stage. It contained twenty wooden counters, each marked with a different number. As a row of coat hooks had once stood nearby, Mara made a tentative identification of the objects as cloakroom tokens. She recorded this as a possibility but did not complete the label for the planned display.

A later search uncovered the room's meeting records. An inventory described a bag of twenty numbered counters used to decide the order in which people would speak during debates. The numbers listed in the inventory matched those on the counters. Mara therefore revised her identification before writing the label.

Explain what “tentative” means as it is used in the passage. Explain how the discovery in the final paragraph supports your answer.