The Trail Creek tooth was excavated in 1949 and reached its full scientific potential only when analyzed with methods developed sixty to seventy years later.

The same pattern — old collection, new methods, new discoveries — applies to archaeological collections worldwide.

This revaluation of old collections is not simply a matter of running new tests on existing material.

It requires identifying the relevant specimens within large and sometimes poorly documented collections; establishing the provenance and contextual information needed to make the specimens scientifically meaningful; developing the analytical protocols needed to extract maximum information from small and degraded samples; and building the interdisciplinary collaborations needed to bring together the different types of expertise required.

The identification of the Trail Creek tooth by Jeff Rasic in 2016 — pulling a single specimen from a collection of many thousands of objects — required knowledge of what to look for, where to look, and why it mattered.