Reconstructing smoking history through dental cementum analysis - a preliminary investigation on modern and archaeological teeth.

ABSTRACT: Acellular extrinsic fibre cementum (AEFC) has been widely utilised in cementochronology to estimate age at death, seasonality, and for life-history reconstruction. Smoking has been commonplace in the UK since the 17th century and is known to compromise oral health and to modulate physiological processes. This study aimed to investigate whether AEFC analysis could identify smoking activity in both modern and archaeological populations. A modern sample (70 teeth from 46 donors) with known age, sex, and smoking status was compared with an archaeological sample (18 teeth from 18 individuals), dating from the 18th/19th centuries in Coventry, UK, whose biographical information was recorded from coffin plates where available. Smoking status for the archaeological individuals was inferred from pip

SUBMITTER: Perrone V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12111438 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature