The image shows a woman at work in an excavation site, carefully documenting the spatial relationships of objects in the ground around her.

This is the unglamorous daily work of archaeology: the meticulous recording of every object’s position, the maintenance of the provenience records that allow researchers to understand the context of each find, the patient attention to detail that makes the difference between information and mere artifact.

The teeth were found in this context — not as a dramatic single discovery, but as two small objects in a vast assemblage of cultural material from a site that had been producing remarkable finds across multiple excavation seasons.

Their significance was not immediately apparent from the objects themselves.