This project examines extinction, knowledge-making, and island histories by tracing the giant tortoises of the Southwest Indian Ocean. Once abundant across Mauritius, Réunion, Rodrigues, Seychelles, and parts of Madagascar, land tortoise populations declined rapidly due to hunting, habitat loss, introduced predators, and political fragmentation.
Drawing on sixteenth- to nineteenth-century British, French, and Dutch natural history sources, together with oral histories and ethnographic approaches to regional knowledge systems, the project analyzes how tortoises have been recorded, classified, remembered, and interpreted.
Although many species have disappeared, broader narratives about turtles (including both land tortoises and sea turtles) persist in ecological memory, spiritual practices, conservation discourses, and museum displays. Central to scientific debates on origins, evolution, and island biogeography, these long-lived vertebrates have also become figures through whom questions of time, continuity, and environmental change have been articulated. These enduring narratives indicate that extinction extends beyond biological rupture into the realm of cosmological and epistemic inquiry.
By tracing turtle remains, records, and stories about their presence and disappearance across islands, the project shows the role of these animals in shaping understandings of how ecological loss unfolds over time. Following both extinct and extant species, it examines how their pasts and afterlives inform articulations of historical and contemporary biocultural relations.