ABSTRACT
In graduate school, a friend of mine was studying variation in tooth morphology of Native American populations from a series of archaeological sites. She had developed a coding system for the curvature of shovel-shaped incisors, and one afternoon while we were in the osteology lab, she asked if I would do an impression for her. I agreed, and she produced a piece of molding clay that I pressed over my upper front teeth. Giving the impression back to her, she pulled out her coding chart and a caliper and proceeded to measure and compare. I knew that my incisors were shovel-shaped, and being Native American, I was confident in the outcome. However, after a minute or so, she informed me that I was only a “two,” which fell within the range that included Europeans and several other world populations. If I had been a “five,” she said, there would have been no question that I was Native American. We were both disappointed by the results, and at the time, I also felt compromised in some way by them.
