Excavating mummy mouths: Assistant professor studies ancient health in Chile

[Adsos Letter]

Source: Daily Wildcat.com (A publication of the University of Arizona)
Kaitlyn Venezia

UA assistant professor James Watson will travel to Chile on March 11 to study the teeth of the world's oldest mummies.

Watson, an assistant professor of anthropology and assistant curator of bioarchaelogy at the Arizona State Museum, will spend four months in Chile studying the oral health of the 8,000-year-old Chinchorro culture, one of the first known populations to mummify its dead.

"It was a family deal; they would mummify family members and reconstruct the body," Watson said. "They would actually live with their ancestors. When their house got too full of mummies, they would bury some, so we found they would bury mummies in family groups. We would sometimes find a male, a female, sometimes a child or two."

Watson was awarded a Fullbright grant, designed to fund international exchange. In Chile, he will study a collection of thousands of mummies, as well as teach an intensive workshop on dental anthropology at the Universidad Tarapaca de Arica. "The thing that I love most is trying to understand who these people were in the past; what their lives were like, what they did, what affected their lives. My main interest is disease in the past, in this case oral disease. These diseases still affect us today, so they have very important implications for modern populations as well. It has real world applications. I'm really excited," Watson said.

http://media.wildcat.arizona.edu/media/storage/paper997/news/2009/03/02/News/Excavating.Mummy.Mouths-3654978.shtml

[izquierdista]

1. Oral disease in the ancient past

I'm sure there is a Repub governor somewhere chafing at this 'waste' of taxpayer dollars....