Infection and Complexity Embodied on Enamel: Oral Health and Dental Pathology at Ancón, Peru

This dissertation begins with a central question: how do you reconstruct community life from a collection that was never built to preserve it? Focusing on the Ancón skeletal assemblage curated at the Field Museum of Natural History, it develops a biocultural history from a collection shaped by fractured provenience, uneven documentation, and a long institutional afterlife. Rather than treating those conditions as noise to be set aside, they are treated as part of the evidence itself, asking what kinds of claims can be responsibly made when archaeological context has been partially broken by excavation, dispersal, exhibition, and curation. The research is grounded in three intersecting bodies of scholarship: Middle Horizon research that understands Wari influence as variable throughout their sphere of influence rather than uniformly imposed; Andean foodways scholarship that treats dietary practices as socially meaningful technologies of community and political relationship-building; and bioarchaeological and microremain research showing that oral pathology and dental calculus can preserve durable evidence for diet, practice, and lived experience where other lines of evidence are limited or absent. To address these questions, the dissertation combines macroscopic dental paleopathology with dental calculus microremain analysis. Macroscopic observations were recorded for 94 individuals, with attention to caries, periapical lesions consistent with abscessing, linear enamel hypoplasia, and antemortem tooth loss, while explicitly accounting for preservation limits, heavy wear, and missing dentition that affect visibility. To move beyond simple claims that maize was present, calculus samples were analyzed through scanning electron microscopy and compared with a central coast comparative sample. The analysis quantified total starch, maize starch, and diagnostic markers consistent with fermentation to distinguish processing practices, not just plant presence. An additional experimental chapter evaluates the effects of soak duration in 10% hydrochloric acid on calculus demineralization and microremain recovery. Equal subsamples were exposed for durations ranging from one week to multiple months under controlled conditions and then processed using standardized SEM preparation. The results show that longer soak times do not meaningfully damage starch grains under these conditions and can improve interpretability by reducing mineral residue that obscures grain surfaces. This methodological finding strengthens confidence that the fermentation signal identified in the Ancón sample is not an artifact of inconsistent preparation. The results indicate that Ancón experienced a high burden of oral disease and that this pattern is best understood through the form of maize consumption rather than maize presence alone. Compared with the central coast comparative sample, Ancón shows a higher proportion of maize starch overall and a markedly elevated proportion of fermented maize, approaching twice the comparative level. Taken together, the dental and microremain evidence supports the conclusion that Ancón’s oral health profile reflects sustained, community-wide engagement with fermented maize products, consistent with chicha as a routine and socially embedded practice linked to Middle Horizon interaction. More broadly, the dissertation demonstrates that legacy museum collections, despite archival damage and ethical complexity, can still yield meaningful reconstructions of lived experience when research design is matched carefully to the strengths and limits of the archive.

Author dc:creator

• Caitlin Monesmith (24400292)

• Biological anthropology
• Dental anthropology

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright
• Open Access after 2028-05-01

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.32995352.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32995352