The profession of dental technician has deep roots in Europe . At least, that seems to follow from the discovery just made public by the team of archaeologists who have worked for years at the Celtic site of Le Chene, in northern France.
What they have found is a pointed fragment of rusted iron along with other teeth from a woman in her 20s and 30s , buried in a wooden burial chamber some 2,300 years ago.
The shape of the metal piece coincides with that of the incisors of the upper jaw of the deceased, whose skull was destroyed when the tomb collapsed. Probably, the piece held a false wood or ivory tooth and was implanted after the young woman died, to clean the corpse.
A "live" intervention, specialists conjecture, would have been excessively painful and dangerous at that time and place, where medical knowledge was conspicuous by its absence before Romanization arrived. The infection caused by the metal would have been devastating and lethal.
In any case, the finding is very surprising, and it is not totally ruled out that the woman wore the prosthesis while she lived. Outside the Old Continent, dental implants have been found in Egypt and the Middle East, manufactured 5,500 years ago.
