See, this skeletal collection has a really deep time history. It spans several hundred years and ends during a time in Peru called the Middle Horizon. BIG STUFF was happening to these guys, but most notably a group called the Wari was moving in towards the end of the skeletal collection. Now, my skeleton pals lived in this little fishing village. They weren’t too close to any of the major centers of trade or political/military influence. However, something was happening to them and their diet and I’m figuring out what that was because skeletons from the earlier part of the collection have great teeth. They’re very clean and while they are worn, we don’t see too many cavities. But in the later part of the collection, they all have awful, awful cavities. Why? It’s likely linked to dietary changes but what the heck were they doing differently? We’re planning to do some different chemical analyses to try and figure out what these guys were doing differently. We know that in European archaeology we see more and more cavities after potatoes were introduced... but potatoes are Peruvian natives, so it’s probably not that. Is it sugar? Is it corn? Is it some other grain that’s being traded to these guys by the Wari? We don’t know, so that’s why I’m down here in the basement hanging out with a bunch of skeletons and giving them dental exams.
Anyways, part of why I am scraping the teeth involves genetic studies. You can pull DNA from dental calculus (that’s what plaque is called after it hardens) - not just human DNA but bacterial DNA as well. I want to look at it to see if there’s any major changes in oral bacteria over time- see if there’s trending patterns of relative prevalence of different strains, that sort of thing.