Dental calculus is a hardened form of dental plaque. In an offline article for Archaeology entitled “Worlds Within Us,” (September / October, 2016, pp. 38-43) Samir Patel reports on a new branch of archaeology – the intersection of field archaeology, dentistry, and genetics:
The mouth is the microbial equivalent of a rainforest, teeming with creatures, interspecies warfare, cataclysms. Some of these residents for a film on your teeth, colonies stuck together with DNA, proteins, and polysaccharides. Left unbrushed, this plaque, for reasons that aren’t really known, occasionally fossilizes in your mouth to form tartar, dental calculus. Calculus is tough and almost universally observed clinging to the teeth of adult skeletons discovered at archaeological sites. For many years this material was ignored, discarded, and otherwise overlooked, as were human bones prior to the introduction of modern archaeological practices. …
Now? With the increase in understanding of the microbiome, the web of life becomes a more salient concept. Although not the first sample published, the Dalheim burials has had a rich yield.
[Christina] Warriner and her coauthors – 32 in total from a range of disciplines – catalogued, from the mouths of four medieval individuals, 40 opportunistic pathogens, including species associated with cardiovascular disease, meningitis, and pneumonia, as well as what might be the oral ancestor of modern gonorrhea. They sequenced the entire genome of Tannarella forsythia, a cause of periodontal disease. They saw dietary DNA from pigs, cruciferous vegetables, and bread wheat. They looked for proteins as well, and found ones associated with pathogen virulence, others produced by the human immune system, and beta-lactoglobulin, a durable dairy protein.
Etc etc. A veritable hoard of information which will further shape our perceptions of the environment and living conditions of our ancestors. Will our insistence on clean teeth deprive future archaeologists of information about us?
