Posts

Showing posts from July, 2012

How to make a replica of 10,000 year old teeth? Wonder no more!

Occasionally, people wonder what it is a dental anthropologist does. Not often, mind. And if they do make the mistake of asking, generally eyes glaze over before you can say 'hydroxyapatite'. So as you can imagine, I get a bit overexcited when people seem to actually want to know how one goes about the business of being the Tooth Fairy.  I've just come back from Turkey, where I've been studying human remains from the beautiful early Neolithic site of Asıklı Höyük , home to the first farmers and earliest settlement of the Anatolian plateau. My mission was to take casts of the teeth, to address questions about childhood health and growth. One of the first queries I got from my fellow archaeologists however, was what, exactly, I actually do -- so I made this little instructional video for the benefit of the lab, and hopefully future students in the biological anthropology program at Hacateppe University. Dental Impressions from Brenna Hassett on Vimeo .

Live dispatches from the Tooth Fairy

Image
#update! day of archaeology site is having some problems, so the links have been temporarily removed... originally posted by   Brennawalks     on   JUNE 29, 2012   as part of the  This is reposted from here at Day of Archaeology 2012 - bigger and badder than last year! #dayofarch So, now you know. The Tooth Fairy is an archaeologist. Archaeologists get everywhere. Like sand. This also applies to  jobs, so it’s not totally impossible that someone who specialises in the minute structures of teeth (see my  previous post from DayofArch 2011 ) would end up in the overwhelmingly awesome  Human Origins Research Group  at the  Natural History Museum, London . For starters, this is an awesome place to work. Yesterday I found out that during WWII, the collections were evacuated to stately homes across the country to escape the Blitz… complete with associated researchers. And there’s a basement here that’s really a bomb shelter which was used by Churchill as a telephone exchange – p