Jewels of the Mouth: Tooth Polishing and Oral Care as Care among the Classic Maya

Summary

This is an abstract from the "(De)Pathologizing the Past: New Perspectives on Intervention and Modification as Care in the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since its inception, studies carried out under the auspices of the Bioarchaeology of Care have largely focused on individuals with significant pathologies and impairments. Often, the concept of caregiving in the past (though defined broadly as “health-related care”) takes on a rather narrow scope limited to caregiving without which an individual could not have survived. This paper encourages an expansion of our idea of care and caregiving in the past to include routine and habitual aesthetic and hygiene upkeep practices (i.e. “personal care”) as well as minor medical interventions. In this pursuit, it highlights the important role that the mouth and human dentition plays in enabling bioarchaeologists to approach these added dimensions of care.

This paper makes this argument by examining the practice of tooth polishing among the Classic Maya. Tooth polishing represents an under-studied yet widespread component of a complex dental tradition comprising aesthetic, therapeutic, and hygienic care practices. The Classic Maya understood the teeth as jewels that needed to be polished, but the act of tooth polishing was as much about cultural aesthetics as it was about dental hygiene. It was a common personal care practice that was also part of upkeeping the “crafted body.”

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• (De)Pathologizing the Past: New Perspectives on Intervention and Modification as Care in the Americas

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50456