A recently excavated odontome from medieval Canterbury, Kent

Abstract

During archaeological excavation of St George's church, Canterbury, 269 skeletons ranging from early medieval to late nineteenth century were recovered. A medieval female aged ca. 23-28 years displayed an unusual dental anomaly, an odontome. Odontomes are infrequent in clinical dentistry. A search of the literature suggests thzt very few archaeological examples have been published and our specimen is the first excavated case reported from Britain. Archaeological material, if subject to radiographic examination, provides a unique source of information for the prevalence of odontomes from prehistoric to modern times.

Dental development pathology in wild artiodactyls: Two prehistoric case studies from France

“…The high relative frequency of this latter group in the literature is probably strongly related to the sheer size of the finds -one odontoma weighted more than 10 kg (Hunter and Langston, 1964) -much more than to any particular specific susceptibility to the condition. Odontomas are slightly better documented in human archeological material in which a dozen or so cases have been described (see examples in Brothwell, 1959;Santini, 1987;Anderson and Andrews, 1993;Strouhal, 1998;Djurić and Rakocević, 2007), including an isolated specimen from Mesolithic Belgium (Polet et al, 2004); they remain however very rare finds.…”