Transforming Ivory Carvings into Archives of Global Environmental History

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2023-04-14

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What might ivory carvings tell historians that texts cannot? Museums and private collectors today hold an astonishing variety and volume of historical ivory carvings. Each carving, in turn, has stories to tell: stories of the carvers who made them, of an era’s aesthetic, of consumers, collectors, and suppliers within the global trade, and of elephants, their lost worlds, and their tusks. Texts reveal many aspects of this history; material artefacts reveal others. Still more history lies within the DNA, stable isotopes, and trace elements within ivory itself. The goal of our team’s project is to connect these disparate types of sources and to unlock the information within ivory through the use of X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy: a novel, non-destructive method of analyzing ivory. The team is establishing how XRF results differ in ivory objects from differing parts of Africa and Asia and building an open-access database of known XRF results for ivory, so that anyone with an XRF spectrometer and an internet connection can identify the provenance of any piece of ivory, from ancient artefacts to illegal contraband today. Our long-term goal is to test museum pieces en masse and use the data we gather to reconstruct and visualize the history of the global ivory trade with unprecedented granularity, rigor, and breadth.

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IDAH, Spring symposium, digital humanities, ivory

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