Subsistence Strategies across the East Eurasian Steppes: Exploring Connections between Diet and Dental Pathology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Within the vast Eurasian steppes, early populations utilized subsistence strategies that were uniquely developed in response to local environmental settings, and recent bioarchaeological work has underscored this connection. This study explores the relationship between dietary intake and dental pathology, focusing on dental calculus, antemortem tooth loss, and carious lesions. The formation and severity of dental calculus, while associated with factors such as oral health and genetic predisposition, has also been potentially linked to diets high in protein, and can preclude caries formation. However, the nature of this connection and how it manifests in multi-resource pastoralist populations, as compared to hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists, has received less attention. To address this, we have compared populations from Mongolia, southern Siberia, and Inner Mongolia, from archaeological contexts spanning from the Bronze Age to the medieval (Mongol) period. The findings demonstrate the interconnected biological processes of these conditions in relation to dietary intake, and also help establish a baseline for comparing dental pathology rates and oral health among multi-resource pastoralist communities across time and place. To this end, the results provide a measure for characterizing the rates of these dental conditions in relation to variable subsistence strategies in the steppe region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39271.0