Squeaky Clean: An Experiment to Test the Usefulness of Cleaning Agents on Silicon Dental Impression Molds

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As surface texture analysis has become more popular in archaeology, various materials were adapted to gather data left by use and dental-wear. Silicon-based dental impression materials, such as President® Jet by Coltène Whaledent, are used to make negative molds of wear patterns. These techniques have been applied to examining the dental microwear of teeth found in the archaeological record and are a useful tool in understanding past diets, vegetation and paleo-environments. Good images of dental wear patterns are captured using silicon impression materials. However, while we can clean the actual artifact, researchers are still confronted with the build-up of dust and finger grease on their silicon samples. For the most part, researchers work around these dirty little anomalies by cutting away the dust and grease from the images, but that can potentially lose valuable data. Using a modern collection of Odocoileus virginianus teeth, dental molds, from President® Jet regular body, were created to test the effectiveness of five different cleaning products: compressed air, water, alcohol, regular dish soap and laboratory soap. Molds were tested to see the effectiveness of the cleaning agent on dust and finger grease and to determine if the cleaning solution altered the molding material.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26053