Multi-isotope analysis of elephant ivory artefacts from Amsterdam: a preliminary provenance study

Abstract

During the last couple of decades, excavations in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, have uncovered many artefacts from post-medieval contexts made of elephant ivory. Historical and archaeological sources show the import of great quantities of elephant ivory by the Dutch West India Company to the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These sources, however, mention only the West African coast, and the Gold Coast in particular, as the source of this ivory and do not shed any light upon the exact locations from which the ivory originated. In order to try to better determine the geographical origins of post-medieval ivory found in Amsterdam, multi-isotope analyses were conducted on twenty-one samples from objects excavated by the Office for Monuments & Archaeology. The results are the first of their kind for West Africa and suggest that ivory was derived from elephants that inhabited different parts of coastal and interior West Africa.

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