Worn Down: Dental Attrition and Dietary Differences at an Early Medieval Settlement in Central Europe

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Medieval diets may have differed in preparation rather than composition, with certain classes, genders, or age groups eating more abrasive and/or more cariogenic preparations of the same foods (Beranová 2007; Esclassan et al. 2015). This study is a bioarchaeological examination of dental attrition at the 9-11th century site complex of Libice nad Cidlinou in what is now the Czech Republic. The dental remains of 115 adults from two contemporaneous cemeteries were examined for masticatory and non-masticatory wear. Despite traditionally recognized status differences between the mortuary contexts of these two cemeteries, few statistically significant differences in dental wear were found between the two cemetery samples. However, for all adult age categories at both cemeteries, males were more likely to exhibit moderate to severe dental attrition than females. This finding suggests that, in general, men were consuming a more abrasive diet than women, regardless of burial location. This project also integrates skeletal data with archaeological and historical sources to offer insight into how dental health is informed by social factors, including status, gender, and religious identity. As such, this work has implications for our understanding of early medieval diets as well as how certain religious practices might be accessed bioarchaeologically.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33505