Alumni Project | Elephant from the Trenches: Zooarchaeology and Provenance Research as a Collaborative Process

In 2022, the Elephant from the Trenches project was born out of an African-European museum exchange between three professionals who met during Module 2 of TheMuseumsLab (MLab) in Berlin.

Team

Dr Annie Antonites (Ditsong National Museum of Natural History, Pretoria, South Africa), Catarina Madruga (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin)

Objective and description

In 2022, the Elephant from the Trenches project was born out of an African-European museum exchange between three professionals who met during Module 2 of TheMuseumsLab (MLab) in Berlin. I did a residency at the Museum für Naturkunde (MfN), specifically to engage with colleagues in the Humanities of Nature department. In my original MLab application, I mentioned two goals for my residency: to develop a concept for merging visual and performing arts with natural history collections; and to develop networks with colleagues to explore potential collaborations. Both goals were realised as an opportunity opened for collaboration with artist / photographer Daniele Ansidei, and historian Catarina Madruga from the MfN’s Humanities of Nature programme and 2021 MLab Alumna. Elephant from the Trenches centres on an African elephant skull – a unique specimen in the MfN mammal collection, whose peculiar features stand out from the row of similar-looking elephant skulls on display. The skull is severely damaged, and its surface reveals different destructions as well as interventions of restoration and preparation, possibly conducted during different stages of its “life”. A large ink inscription on the skull reads “Found in an English trench in St. Eloi, France, in 1916. Imperial War Museum” [translated from German]. This inscription, and the deteriorated condition of the elephant skull, immediately raised more questions than answers. The inscription hints at a multi-layered “life” as animal, museum object, and war trophy. Of the biological individual, the living elephant, and how and why its remains were found in war-ridden France in 1916, nothing is known. Following the project launch, photographic recording of the skull’s damaged surface opened further research questions. In particular, the chronological events that happened before the animal’s death (Where did it come from? Was it a captive or wild animal? How old is it?), but also of its “life” as a memorialisation of war.

The elephant skull is an ideal “object” for provenance research; it is an African mammal but without much information on its origins and journey to St. Eloi and onwards to the MfN. In the context of colonial collecting, compounded by its lack of provenance, this specimen lends itself to scholarly investigation and critique. Such studies on African cultural objects in European museum contexts are becoming widespread; however, it is less often conducted for natural history specimens that originate from the continent. Elephant from the Trenches is routed in an interdisciplinary framework that brings together forensic, visual, and historic techniques.

By combining provenance methods with approaches and inquiries from the disciplines of zooarchaeology, visual critique, and the history of collecting practices, the project will extract the potential complex biographies of an African natural science specimen in a European collection. In addition, it is envisioned that publication of this novel methodology will contribute to the development of interdisciplinary research in natural science collections as a museum concept.

Implementation

As a funded alumni project, Annie Antonites was able to join Catarina Madruga and Daniele Ansidei in Berlin in September 2023, to study the skull. A detailed forensic analysis identified traces of human damage (paint residues, damage from a sharp implement, evidence of museum mounting fixtures) and natural damage (sun bleaching and surface weathering) that have opened new avenues of interpretation. Although not completely resolved, our team now has a better understanding of the events that imprinted on the many “lives” of the skull. We are currently working on an article that will form part of a special issue on elephants in the Humanimalia journal as well as a book proposal and installation concept.


This project was funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through the Goethe-Institut.