From a West African Savanna to a Portuguese Dining Table: Ivory on the Move in a Late Medieval World

We are delighted to welcome Dr Ashley Coutu to our History Research Seminar series. Ashley will be joining us on Tuesday, 3 December, 4.15-5.30pm in The Diamond, workroom 3. She will be presenting a paper entitled 'From a West African Savanna to a Portuguese Dining Table: Ivory on the Move in a Late Medieval World'.

Ashley Coutu is Research Curator (African Archaeology) and Deputy Head of Research at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Her research is interdisciplinary, reflecting interests and training across fields such as African archaeology, biomolecular archaeology, and historical ecology.

Abstract: Archaeologists, historians, and biologists are working together to develop an exciting range of interdisciplinary methods which are shifting our understanding of material flows and inter-regional connections in the medieval world, one molecule at a time. Using an object biography approach which combines archival, archaeological and scientific data sets, it is becoming easier to source materials such as ivory ‘from a savanna to a dining table’.  By tracing artefact journeys, we can map how materials move and are eventually crafted and valued in different cultural contexts to their origins. This talk will use a series of case studies of African ivory objects on the move to explore the potential of these combined methods to reveal human-animal relationships in the past and links between Africa and the globe over the last millennia.