Towards understanding isotope variability in elephant ivory to establish isotopic profiling and source-area determination

Abstract We present here new isotopic data (δ 13 C, δ 15 N, δ 18 O, δ 2 H, and δ 34 S) from pulverised ivory powder, measured by continuous flow isotope ratio mass spectrometry from an unprecedented large dataset of 507 ivory samples, derived from twenty-eight African and six Asian elephant range states. The aim of this study is to assess the accuracy of isotopic fingerprinting and to evaluate its forensic potential and limitations to predict the provenance of ivory of unknown origin. We constructed a nominal assignment framework for the African reference samples, consisting of 208 different sites and applied the weighted k -Nearest Neighbor Classifier with reference site as classifier and …