Mapping African elephant molecules and memories

Speaker: Dr Ashley Coutu; Senior Research Curator and Deputy Head of Research at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
Series: Pitt-Rivers Archaeological Science Seminar Series

African elephants have been the focus of conservation policies for decades since the international ban on ivory trading in the 1990s. But how are these policies and legislation on ivory affecting people's relationships with ivory and with elephants? Across the African continent today, savanna and forest elephants are either too abundant in some areas or rapidly declining in others and expanding human populations is the major threat.

In this talk, we will delve into 2 case studies from the perspective of abundance, or lack thereof: first, the UK Ivory Act 2018. The enforcement of ivory trading has caused ivory to be stockpiled across the UK. Stable isotope and mt DNA analyses of ivory confiscations - from police cells to amnesty drives to family attics - have given us a rich data set. These data are helping us to better understand the 19th century ivory trade and the population structure of today's African elephant populations who share ancestors with these historic elephants.

From stockpiles of abundance, we move to scarce and fragmented elephant herds in South Sudan, where our Elephant Memories project is mapping oral histories and movements of historic elephant ivory to understand how civil war and human elephant conflict have disrupted and modified memories of elephants in South Sudan. This work with modern elephant conservation groups and community oral history collaboratives sheds light on the historic to modern transitions of these heavily hunted elephant populations. The work aims to capture how the loss of these megaherbivores not only affect the ecology of the landscapes but also the memories and histories of people with elephants and ivory.