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North Country dentists collect about 100 teeth for use by SLU anthropology students

Posted 2/11/12

CANTON -- Don’t say you’d give your eye teeth for anything when you’re around St. Lawrence University Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Mindy Pitre -- she might just take you up on …

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North Country dentists collect about 100 teeth for use by SLU anthropology students

Posted

CANTON -- Don’t say you’d give your eye teeth for anything when you’re around St. Lawrence University Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Mindy Pitre -- she might just take you up on it.

To assist students in her biological anthropology courses, Pitre asked three area dentists to donate teeth. To date, about 100 teeth have been collected.

“They had to agree to collect some information for us, such as sex, age, tooth number and reason for extraction,” Pitre said. “They were more than willing to help out.”

Student volunteers, some of whom plan to become dentists, prepped the teeth for use by boiling them in water to remove any soft tissue attached. Teeth are then treated with hydrogen peroxide, a mild bleaching agent, to sterilize them.

The teeth will be used as part of a teaching collection for identification, pathological study and for projects. For example, Pitre said, students will use the teeth to learn how to identify each of the tooth categories (incisor, canine, premolar and molar), and learn how to identify teeth in general, such as upper-left premolar.

“These are skills that will be useful for students interested in careers in forensics, osteology and even the medical sciences,” Pitre noted. In addition, studying teeth can help students to understand diseases, since several were pulled because of underlying problems such as cavities, periodontal disease or decay. Having information on the “owners’“ teeth will assist in learning identification techniques.

Pitre studies human skeletons to address questions related to the biocultural effects of environmental stress and cultural change. She has excavated and studied human skeletons in Canada, the United Kingdom, Egypt, the Sudan and Syria. This semester, she’s teaching a course called Bones of Contention, where students learn about the bones of the human body; how to identify, reconstruct, and analyze human bones; and how to place the human skeleton in anthropological context, to analyze the interactions among biology, culture and the environment through time. The teeth will be used for that course, as well as others.