Teeth of 229 people buried at Hellenistic and Roman Paphos show more gum disease than decay

Grigoria Ioannou, of the Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center at the Cyprus Institute, has recorded the teeth of 229 people buried at Nea Paphos in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Her paper, published online on 22 July in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology (volume 36, issue 4, pages 1087–1099), finds tooth decay uncommon in both groups she studied, and gum disease and teeth lost during life more frequent.

Two cemeteries, five conditions

The skeletons come from two burial grounds. The Eastern Necropolis, just outside the walls of the coastal city, gave a minimum of 97 individuals; the cemetery of the Upper City at Ktima, under the modern town of Paphos, gave a minimum of 132. The paper covers the Hellenistic period, which it dates 312–58 BCE, and the Roman, 58 BCE–395 CE.

Ioannou recorded five conditions as indicators of diet: caries (decay); calculus, which is mineralised plaque or tartar; periapical cavities, holes in the jaw around the tip of a root; periodontal disease, which attacks the gums and the bone that holds the teeth; and teeth lost before death. The first three were rare in both cemeteries. Gum disease and lost teeth were common.

Ktima showed higher rates of dental disease than the Eastern Necropolis, which Ioannou takes to mean that the two populations differed. Men and women also differed, within each cemetery and between them, and the differences were often statistically significant.

Earlier work in the two cemeteries

Most of what is known of the eastern cemetery comes from rescue work. The Department of Antiquities excavated tombs there through the 1980s as tourist hotels went up. Demetrios Michaelides, as the Department's Archaeological Officer, directed the large campaigns of 1983–1989, which opened about 500 tombs, nearly all of them east of the city walls [1, p. 554]. Very few of the tombs are preserved, and the excavation records are unpublished [1, p. 554].

The bones from 31 of its rock-cut chamber tombs, a minimum of 275 people, were studied earlier. Sherry C. Fox and Kathryn Marklein describe the Eastern Necropolis as the largest ancient cemetery known on Cyprus and the burial ground of the city's non-elite; the northern cemetery, the so-called Tombs of the Kings, may have been reserved for the elite, but its human remains were not kept [2, p. 198]. The Paphos dead showed porotic hyperostosis, a porous lesion of the skull for which anaemia, vitamin deficiency and malaria are all possible causes; contemporary remains from Ancient Corinth did not [2, p. 198].

Tombs at Ktima were dug by the French mission of Jean Bérard in 1953–1955 and in the Department's rescue excavations of 1961–1969, which in 1968 included a large tomb, probably early Roman, in the courtyard of the police station.

What comes next

Ioannou places her paper among the few bioarchaeological studies of teeth from ancient Cyprus, and describes it as the first to compare Hellenistic and Roman diet and social differences by cemetery and by sex. She proposes isotope analysis, the study of microscopic wear on tooth surfaces and of food debris trapped in calculus, and larger samples from other Cypriot cemeteries.