Melbourne's buried teeth

During Victoria’s Big Build construction works, archaeologists in the city made a gruesome find at one of the excavation sites. Over 2000 human teeth were found in and around a collapsed metal drain pipe – understood to be the largest collection of historical extracted teeth in the Southern Hemisphere.

Research revealed that two dentists had operated on that section of Swanston Street in the late 1800s to the 1930s. Evidently, they had been discarding extracted teeth from their patients via their plumbing and other waste disposal means, resulting in over 2000 teeth remaining on the premises – including a large amount inside a metal drain pipe!

Teeth are very good at recording information about our health, where we grew up and where our ancestors might have lived, what we do day-to-day and how we looked after our oral health – either through disease prevention or treatment.

Researchers from the University of Melbourne, an archaeology firm and Heritage Victoria are now studying these teeth as part of the wider 'Metro Teeth' project. This team of researchers includes odontologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and clinical dental experts. Using observational and sophisticated imaging and sampling techniques, these scientists are unearthing the stories of these early Melburnian dental patients.

We will work with the MDAP team to:

• curate and create an accessible online repository for the data
• correlate stratigraphic information with subsequent data, for example morphological, health and domicile, derived from the collection.

This project will help us to use these advanced methods and our understanding of how teeth grow and react to their environment to tell stories about the people living and going to the dentist at this time. It also gives us information about how Melbourne’s health changed over this time period, and we can test how that is different, or the same, in the health of modern Melburnians.