When archaeologists lifted a skeleton from the burial grounds of Aberdeen’s East Kirk of St Nicholas Church in 2006, a glint of gold caught their attention. Threaded around the lower teeth of a middle-aged man was a thin wire made from gold alloy, carefully shaped to hold a loosened tooth in place. Radiocarbon dating places the burial sometime between 1460 and 1670 CE, a range spanning roughly two centuries, and the device had stayed fixed to his jawbone ever since. As detailed in a peer-reviewed case report published in the British Dental Journal in 2025, the ligature is now recognized as the earliest known example of restorative dental work of its kind recovered in Scotland, and one of the rarest pre-17th-century European cases still found attached to skeletal remains.
The excavation and what was found
The East Kirk of St Nicholas sits in the center of Aberdeen and has served as a place of worship and burial since the medieval period. The site is catalogued under reference NJ90NW0916 in the Aberdeen City Historic Environment Record. Trial trenching took place between February and March 2005, led by the Aberdeen City Council Archaeological Unit under the direction of A. S. Cameron. A full excavation followed from January through December 2006, producing a large assemblage of human remains and grave goods.
Among them was the skeleton of a man estimated to have been middle-aged at death. His lower jaw held the gold-alloy ligature: a length of fine wire looped around specific teeth to stabilize one that had become loose during his lifetime. The British Dental Journal case report describes the construction in clinical detail, noting that the device was functional rather than cosmetic. It was designed to keep a tooth in the mouth, not simply to look impressive.
Gold was a practical choice for anyone attempting oral repair in this period. A separate peer-reviewed study on the history of dental biomaterials explains that gold wire appears repeatedly in early interventions because the metal resists corrosion, can be bent and shaped with simple hand tools, and is biocompatible with human tissue. Few other materials available before the 17th century could survive the wet, acidic environment of a living mouth without breaking down.
Why Aberdeen, and why gold
The radiocarbon date range of 1460 to 1670 CE places this burial in the Early Modern period, a stretch of roughly two centuries during which Aberdeen was one of Scotland’s wealthiest trading ports. The city maintained commercial links to the Baltic and the Low Countries, connections well attested in Aberdeen’s surviving burgh records and in scholarship on the city’s medieval and early modern economy. That economic context matters. Access to gold alloy and the specialized skill needed to fashion a dental appliance would have required both money and connections to craftspeople with metalworking expertise.
The man who received this treatment was almost certainly someone of means. The case report does not identify his social rank or occupation beyond his approximate age, but the presence of gold in his mouth tells its own story. In a period when most people endured tooth loss without intervention, having a loose tooth wired back into place with precious metal was an extraordinary measure.
Tooth decay and periodontal disease were widespread in Early Modern Scotland. Diets heavy in coarse bread, dried fish, and increasingly available sugar took a toll, and there were no trained dentists in the modern sense. Barber-surgeons, goldsmiths, or itinerant healers could all plausibly have performed the work. The British Dental Journal report describes the technical execution of the ligature but does not attribute it to a specific type of practitioner.
What scholars still do not know
Several gaps remain. The full chemical composition and isotopic fingerprint of the gold alloy have not been published in the primary records available as of June 2026. Isotopic analysis could reveal whether the gold originated from Scottish sources, Baltic trade networks, or Mediterranean supply chains, but that data either has not been collected or has not yet appeared in print.
There is also the question of how this find compares to older claimed examples of dental bridgework from the ancient Mediterranean. Gold-wire dental appliances attributed to Phoenician and Egyptian contexts have circulated in dental history literature for decades, including the so-called “Giza Bridge.” But scholars have challenged several of these artifacts. A detailed reinterpretation of a Phoenician dental appliance housed in the Louvre argues that some of these devices were postmortem additions, placed on the dead for burial rather than used by living patients. That distinction changes everything: a device wired onto a corpse for ritual purposes is fundamentally different from one installed in a living person’s mouth to restore function.
The Aberdeen ligature, still attached to the mandible and showing signs consistent with use during life, sits in a different category. Yet calling it the “earliest known” globally would overstate the evidence. It is more precisely described as the earliest known in Scotland and among the rarest confirmed pre-17th-century European examples still attached to skeletal remains.
Direct field notes or personal statements from the lead excavators of the 2006 dig have not surfaced in publicly available institutional records. The site record confirms the timeline and scope of the excavation, but the interpretive detail comes primarily from later specialist analysis rather than from the dig team’s own published accounts. Where the device and skull are currently housed has not been specified in the published literature.
How the sourcing holds up for the Aberdeen gold ligature
The strongest foundation here is the peer-reviewed case report in the British Dental Journal, which provides direct physical description of the ligature, its placement on specific teeth, and the radiocarbon-derived date range. This is primary clinical and archaeological evidence, examined by specialists in both dentistry and osteology. The Aberdeen City Historic Environment Record and the Archaeology Data Service entry for the 2005 evaluation corroborate the excavation timeline and site provenance. Together, these sources confirm the basic facts: the object exists, it was found in a documented archaeological context, and it dates to the period claimed.
The broader historical picture, including claims about ancient Phoenician or Egyptian dental devices, rests on shakier ground. Those artifacts have been studied for over a century, but repeated scholarly reinterpretation has weakened confidence in some of the oldest examples. When a 2023 review of dental biomaterials history flags that certain ancient specimens may be postmortem rather than therapeutic, it signals that the field is still actively sorting genuine clinical interventions from funerary customs.
For now, the Aberdeen gold ligature stands as something rare and concrete: a device that was almost certainly used in life, recovered from a well-documented excavation, and analyzed by qualified specialists. Five centuries after someone threaded gold wire around a stranger’s teeth in a Scottish port city, the work is still holding.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
