Our mouth tells many things, especially after death. Archaeologists have been working in the laboratory for years to discover diets, diseases and even migratory movements of our human ancestors from the ancient teeth found in their graves.
Science has evolved so much in this field that modern techniques can even be used to study something as precise as periodontitis, also called gum disease, a serious infection that damages soft tissue and, without proper treatment, can destroy the bone that holds the teeth.
We now know, for example, that 400 years ago a French aristocrat suffered from this disease and tried desperately to remedy it by using gold wire to hold her teeth in place. "The objective of the treatment she followed was threefold: therapeutic, aesthetic and social," write the researchers from the Université Paul Sabatier de Toulouse in an article published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
This seventeenth-century Gallic elite woman was not only concerned with curing her oral problem and maintaining a pretty and flirtatious smile, she was also interested in her appearance, a detail that would explain "that aristocratic women were subjected to strong social conditions such as stress or widowhood ”, they add.
The body of Anne d'Alegre, who died in 1619, was discovered in 1988 during an archaeological dig at the Chateau de Laval in northwestern France. He had been embalmed in a lead coffin, so both his skeleton and her teeth were remarkably well preserved.
When they found him, the archaeologists already noted that he had a dental prosthesis, but at the time they did not have the proper scanning tools to learn more about this treatment. Now, however, an X-ray scan has made it possible to obtain three-dimensional images that showed that gold thread was used to join and tighten several of his teeth.
The solution, however, turned out to be a headache for the person affected, according to experts from the University of Toulouse. Rozenn Colleter, the study's lead author, says this ornate dental work only "made things worse" in d'Alegre's mouth.
The gold wires, he notes, would have needed repeated adjustment over the years. By not occurring, they ended up further destabilizing the nearby teeth. But Anne d'Alegre endured the pain stoically because she had more interests than those directly linked to medical reasons.
France lived through turbulent times between the 16th and 17th centuries, a black period of permanent crisis. In addition to the war with Spain there were the religious wars between Catholics and Calvinist Protestants, known as Huguenots, and the Fronde civil wars between nobles and royalty.
D'Alegre, who was a Huguenot, married the duc de Laval in 1583 and was widowed for the first time three years later, when she was 21 years old and with a young son in her care, Guy XX de Laval. As the country plunged into the Eighth Religious War, both were forced to go into hiding from Catholic forces while King Henry III confiscated their property.
His son eventually converted to Catholicism and went to fight in Hungary, where he died in battle at the age of 20. After being widowed for the second time, Anne d'Alegre died of an illness at the age of 54. “Her teeth from her show that she went through a lot of stress,” Colleter says.
Part of that pressure came from being part of the aristocracy. Four hundred years ago, as it is now, the appearance of women in public lives was constantly judged, and appearance "was related to value and rank in society," say the researchers.
Ambroise Pare, a contemporary of D'Alegre and physician to several French kings, designed similar dental prostheses and claimed in his day that "if a patient has no teeth, his speech becomes depraved." A pleasant smile was particularly important to this aristocrat, a "controversial" socialite who was widowed twice and "didn't have a good reputation," Colleter concludes. The team of archaeologists and dentists further identified that she had an artificial tooth made of elephant ivory and not hippopotamus ivory, which was the popular material at the time.
