Transforming Ivory Carvings into Archives of Global Environmental History: An Interdisciplinary Approach

This presentation describes the research of an interdisciplinary team here at IUB working to reconstruct the history of the global ivory trade by using the information contained within ivory itself. What might ivory carvings tell us that historical texts would not? A great deal, it turns out. The DNA, stable isotopes, and trace elements within elephant ivory in particular reveal details about distinctive elephant populations and their local environments. Because historical ivory carvings are so abundant, moreover—private collectors and museums hold astonishingly vast collections of ivory today—investigators could, in theory, use this information to chart the history of the ivory trade and its consequences with unprecedented granularity and breadth. In practice, however, doing such research is impossible. It is simply too destructive: DNA and stable isotope analyses, for example, require drilling and grinding samples, and museum collections are protected and off-limits. 

This presentation offers an overview of our team’s efforts to overcome this challenge by developing a new, non-destructive method of studying ivory: X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy. The talk introduces what historians know about the ivory trade, provides an overview of XRF spectrometry and previous studies of it on ivory, and provides an update on our own work, including the research we are conducting on historical carvings from the Eskenazi Museum and the Lilly Library, the DNA analysis we are pursuing at IU’s Genomics Lab, and the database we are building of elephant ivory samples from throughout Africa and Asia and the XRF signatures they evince.