Year: 2026
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Teeth are highly informative owing to their durability, high mineral content (enamel is 96% mineral), resistance to postmortem changes, and precise, regular developmental timeline. This chapter briefly describes selected research directions in dental anthropology that are used to study past populations. It offers an overview of dental anthropology, combining developmental, morphological, and population-based approaches to highlight the role of dentition as an integrated system that reveals human biology throughout life and over evolutionary time. It begins with basic information about the morphogenesis and histogenesis of teeth, followed by a brief overview of the processes of tooth eruption and post-eruptive tooth movements, along with descriptions of developmental models and morphological variability of human teeth (including metric and non-metric dental crown traits, root morphology, and sexual dimorphism). Basic methods of age estimation based on dentition are also discussed. The next section of the chapter focuses on incremental growth markers observed in enamel and dentin, which reflect regular physiological changes in the activity of ameloblasts and odontoblasts (such as prism cross striations, von Ebner lines, Retzius lines, Andresen’s lines), as well as markers of physiological stress during pre-, peri-, and postnatal development (including neonatal line – NNL, and accentuated lines – AL). The chapter concludes with a brief overview of selected dental pathologies, such as enamel hypoplasia, dental caries, and dental calculus (tartar), alongside basic information on research methods and analytical options. It also discusses the potential to reconstruct the diet of past populations based on these pathologies.
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology (arts and humanities)
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7172419203