I made a friend a few years back, during my freshman year of college, who wanted nothing more than to be a dentist. We bonded in a lecture hall for general chemistry at eight am each day as she confessed that on every date she went on, she could only ever look at the person’s teeth.
We eventually drifted apart–I moved across the country, and as far as I know she’s a dental student now. That is not to mention how utterly bizarre I found her fascination with one’s incisors. Today, I find myself in a similar situation; that is to say, surrounded by people who love teeth.
We all drift through a hobby or fascination or two, perhaps every few weeks or months. The teeth people, however, have one constant (which I’m sure you can infer). Until this course, and my swift introduction to the world of archaeology and paleoanthropology, I had assumed that I was safe from teeth, that my dentist-free world was a veritable eden. As I recently discovered, that was not the case. Not only do I find myself sleeping within a few dozen feet of tooth enthusiasts, I’ve also found that the archaeologist teeth people are much, much worse than the dentists.
Tell me the last time you found a dentist carrying around a ziploc bag filled to the brim with teeth? Or one with real teeth lining the shelves of their office, stashed in their pockets, affixed in plexiglass museum cases? Familiar words evocative of terror like “cavity,” fade into the past as vocabulary such as “brachiodont,” “occlusal surface,” and “infundibulum,” emerge.
This morning, the teeth people (our lovely professor, Dr. Manuel Dominguez Rodgrigo, another amazing Rice professor, Dr. Mary Pendergrast, and a member of Dr. Manuel’s team, David (super cool guy by the way (a rock person, not a tooth person))) led us out of our camp into the gorge towards a valley filled with bones, stone tools, and many, many molars. There, they gave us one task: collect the teeth. We toiled for hours to satisfy their craving for teeth, scaling layers and layers of sediment to retrieve teeth from every taxon.
My collection
Afterwards, we took our bags full of grotesque trophies back to the teeth people’s lair (the Olduvai Gorge Museum) to add to their collections (identify the animals whose teeth we had collected). Dr. Manuel spent hours instructing us in the ways of the teeth, their cusps and lobes, who they belonged to and what their stories were. Among those identified were many belonging to my taxon, Alcelaphini: Connochaetes, Parmularius, Megalotragus. Against my will, I began to be swayed towards the cult of teeth.
The brainwashing did not stop there–Dr. Mary led us on a trip to the Mary Leakey Living Museum, where we toured an old archaeology lab, barely more than a dusty shed, holding shelves upon shelves of… did you guess it? Teeth. Tusks and pre-molars and canines, teeth for eating and teeth for fighting, all crammed into wooden trays and old cardboard boxes and oil cans. More teeth than even the teeth people knew what to do with. It was magical.
Misc. objects from the lab
Some of the oil cans bore Dr. Mary’s handwriting, untouched since her dissertation work in 2007. Such is the plight of teeth people: they are always finding new teeth, and leaving their old ones behind.
Though there were many other events in our day (rushing for additional Kenyan visas so that we can leave the country, enjoying student presentations by Alex, Caroline, and Kamden, finding an obese locust on our midday walk), I feel the greatest urge to inform you, my readership, of the teeth. And perhaps most importantly, I must confess: I am now a tooth person.
Hugs and kisses and hypsodonts,
Rose
