Medieval Dental Crisis: Scientists Researched Medieval Viking Skull

Even though modern medicine has various fascinating technological and pharmaceutical tools, humanity faces national dental health problems in almost every country.

And now imagine how things stood, let's say, 1000 years ago.

You can't go wrong if you think that global dental health in medieval was devastating. Using the modern diagnostical approach, a group of dental specialists from the University of Gothenburg recently researched Swedish Viking age skulls and identified various severe disorders, including tooth cavities, periodontal and maxillofacial diseases, infections, etc.

Why it's important?

This case is a unique example of how dental practitioners can enhance archeological research – usually, such analysis requires invasive intervention, meaning that archeologists need to remove part of bones to reveal some health features.

But in this paper, specialists, with the help of dentists from Sweden's Public Dental Service, used a novel approach – they literally provide diagnostics for ancient Vikings' skulls using CT scans, as they do with modern patients, analyzing bones layer by layer to detect particular diseases.

What exactly did they find?

Scientists analyzed 15 Viking-era individuals' skulls, dating about the 10-12th centuries, and found a bunch of severe disorders:

67% (10 out of 15) "participants" had signs of periodontal disease
80% (12/15) had root infections
53% (8/15) had TMJ abnormalities
27% (4/15) were diagnosed with tooth cavities

And there was just only the most widespread condition, besides which the scientists also found sinusitis, mastoiditis, etc. That's hard to imagine how hard life was if the individual had only about a third of the mentioned disorder, considering that there were no effective pain-relieving drugs or other pharmaceutical solutions.

Also, scientists found traces of some severe pathologies, like cysts of the tooth in the picture below:

In general, this research paw the way for a new approach when actual medical specialists can "diagnose" archeological funding using non-invasive methodologies and their experience.

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