An archaeological dig at the site of a 12th-century church in Scotland has unearthed more evidence that “advanced dental treatments” existed for hundreds of years prior to the formal establishment of modern dentistry, a new study contends. But, unfortunately, the sheer cost of this nearly solid gold medieval procedure was very likely out of reach for most people.
Researchers with universities in Australia, Scotland, and the United States pieced together details on the new find: a thin gold ligature wrapped deftly around two old teeth. The ligature, something like a modern dental bridge, stretched out over the healed socket of a tooth now very much lost to history. Its thin metal wire (82.4% gold, 9.8% silver, and 2.5% copper) would be considered 20-carat gold today. It was found carefully threaded around two incisors jutting out from the jawbone of a man once buried at the East Kirk of St. Nicholas Kirk in Aberdeen, Scotland.
“The most likely purpose for this ligature,” according to the team that investigated this old dental work, “was to attempt to either retain the right lateral incisor or to provide a bridging scaffold to sustain a prosthetic tooth.”
The researchers placed the time of this man’s life and oral care somewhere within the late Middle Ages, between the years 1460 and 1670, based on radiocarbon dating performed at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre. This broad assessment, a range over two centuries long, was the best estimate currently available, they noted, given that the man’s jawbone had been found alone, “divorced from its original context.”
But the bone’s general location, interned within the grounds of an affluent parish church, was enough for them to conclude that he was once “a relatively wealthy member of the community.”
Peerless medieval ‘dentatores’
In the centuries before dentistry became officially credentialed in the United Kingdom in 1860, the field was rife with enterprising barbers, barber-surgeons, local women with herbal medicine expertise, and even moonlighting traveling showmen. “Depending on availability, one could also seek relief from a ‘tooth-drawer,’” the researchers noted, “who were often carnival performers that travelled around the country peddling proprietary methods for ‘painlessly’ extracting teeth.”
Scotland at this time was also blessed with comparably better trained “dentatores,” dental specialists schooled in more advanced techniques passed down by Arabian doctors, like Abul Qasim al-Zahrawi who practiced on the Iberian Peninsula in the first century CE. (Medical historians credit Al-Zahrawi’s medical encyclopedia Kitab al-Tasrif with advocating for dental reconstruction methods that incorporated oxidation-resistant metals, like gold.)
Dentatores weren’t cheap, however, and the mere presence of this kind of specialized work “illustrates that wealthier individuals had access to advanced dental treatments,” as the researchers argued in their study, published this April in the British Dental Journal.
Non-elite Scots, they noted, were more likely to receive dental treatment in the form of simple herbal remedies for toothaches—including “green turf heated with embers” and “cow dung poultice,” an appetizing heated mixture that incorporates exactly what it sounds like. “The administration of such folk remedies was practiced in Scotland into the 20th century,” the researchers said.
Years of dental work
This latest round of excavation at St. Nicholas began in 2021, part of a preservation project to transform the kirk (a Scottish word for church) into a local heritage site.
The study’s lead authors, biological anthropologist Jenna Dittmar and osteoarchaeologist Marc Oxenham, had traveled from the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine in Louisiana and Australian National University in Canberra, respectively, to collaborate on local excavations.
In a previous project with their hosts at the University of Aberdeen’s department of archaeology, Dittmar and Oxenham examined teeth and other skeletal remains that had been recovered from local victims of the ‘Black Death,’ which ravaged Aberdeen from 1644 to 1649. These plague years sit comfortably within the latter bound of their well-to-do dental patient’s possible lifetime, which may someday yield clues as to how he died.
As Oxenham put it in a statement accompanying that 2024 plague study, “This was a particularly desperate time to have been alive in Scottish history.”
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