ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Archaeol.
Sec. Human Bioarchaeology and Paleopathology
This article is part of the Research TopicUnderstanding Past Communal Health: Social Responses to Communal Health in the PastView all articles
The role of religious faith in dental pathological lesion patterning and approaches to care in a medieval Portuguese assemblage
Provisionally accepted
- 1Augustana University, Sioux Falls, United States
- 2Câmara Municipal de Santarém, Santarém, Portugal
- 3Instituto de Estudos Medievais, Universidade NOVA, Lisbon, Portugal
- 4University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, United States
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The European middle ages (c. 500 - 1500 CE) is often seen as a period of poor oral health and hygiene, as evidenced through artistic, textual, or popular media portrayals. Anthropological analyses have the unique potential to illuminate what medieval mouths were actually like through direct examination of dental and skeletal tissues themselves. In doing so, we can not only document the variability of dental diseases, but also how medieval communities responded to them. This study examines dental pathological lesions (caries, antemortem tooth loss, periodontal disease, periapical lesions, and calculus) and tooth wear from skeletal remains recovered from municipal excavations in Santarém, central Portugal. These assemblages comprise multiple faith communities (Muslims and Christians) from the medieval period (7th – 13th c. C.E.), as based on their distinct funerary treatment. As such, the presence of distinct faith communities buried in adjacent graves offers us the opportunity to furnish a comparative approach to see how health and disease (in this case, of the oral cavity) vary by faith community. Results demonstrated that Islamic females exhibited higher frequencies of antemortem tooth loss, caries, and calculus compared to their Islamic male counterparts, while Chrisitan males exhibited higher caries and calculus frequencies compared to Islamic males. Results and patterns of dental pathological lesions are discussed in terms of religious and temporal differences in diet as well as religious differences in oral healthcare and hygiene as evidenced by ethnohistoric documents, with a particular focus on how keeping a clean mouth was both a physical and spiritual act.
Keywords: Bioarchaeology, medieval, dental anthropology, Oral health & hygiene, Ethnohistoric accounts
Received: 12 Jun 2025; Accepted: 06 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Trombley, Santos, Liberato, Matias and Agarwal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Trent Trombley, trent.trombley@augie.edu
Sabrina C Agarwal, agarwal@berkeley.edu
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