A whale tooth’s journey from the sea to a Copper Age pit

When archaeologists were digging a new library site at Valencina de la Concepcién in southwest Spain in 2018, they uncovered an unusual item: half of a large sperm-whale tooth lying in a 4,000-year-old pit.

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Because nothing like it had ever been reported from Copper-Age Iberia, the team ran a bevy of tests to learn where it could have come from and how it ended up in the pit.Thus, based on evidence of marine boring and beach-root damage, the team unravelled the tooth’s long journey from a sperm whale’s mouth and to a settlement deep inland, offering en route a timeline of coastal processes four millennia ago.The team shot overlapping photos with a camera and processed them to build a detailed 3D model that could be rotated on a screen, allowing tiny marks to be examined without handling the fragile specimen.Then team members used a digital microscope to reveal surface scratches, drill holes, and biological bores smaller than a millimetre wide.