Biomolecular Preservation in Dental Calculus from the Teotihuacan Ritual Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the Classic Period (AD 1-550), thousands of people migrated to the ancient city of Teotihuacan. This population growth forged Teotihuacan into a center for economic, political, and religious activities for the Mesoamerican region. While archaeological evidence has provided a wealth of information about the state, little is known about its inhabitants. Several interdisciplinary approaches, such as chemical isotope analysis, have generated some data about some individuals, but genetic studies at Teotihuacan remain scarce due to the lack of biomolecule preservation. However, the DNA of dental calculus provides a new source of ancient biomolecules that may be more robust to contamination and degradation than the DNA found in dentine. In this study, we applied shotgun sequencing techniques to four dental calculus samples from two localities at Teotihuacan. All four individuals lived during the Classic Period. Three individuals were interred within the Moon Pyramid, while one individual was interred within the nearby Plaza of the Columns Complex. Our results suggest that the biomolecular integrity of dental calculus is context-dependent. Although we failed to recover an oral microbiome for three samples, the recovery of one microbiome still expands the geographic and temporal dataset of ancient dental calculus.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23960