Detecting stress in early-forming teeth: Advancing, optimising and interpreting dental cortisol methods and data for archaeology

Stress influences health and wellbeing throughout the human life course, from prenatal to final stages. However, there are multiple methodological challenges to assessing past occurrences of stress. In studies of living populations, typical measures of stress only reflect recent experience.

In archaeological populations, stress markers in skeletons are often challenging to interpret as they are non-specific and indirect measures of stress. Cortisol is a glucocorticoid hormone produced in response to stressors, stimulating changes in multiple bodily systems. Therefore, cortisol acts as a primary channel through which external stressors become internalised within the body.

Although cortisol is commonly assessed in blood, saliva and hair from living humans and animals as a sensitive indicator of recent stress experience, new research has successfully detected cortisol in teeth from living and archaeological populations.

Teeth begin development in-utero, providing a record of early life experience, and also preserve well archaeologically, overcoming some of the difficulties in retrospective analyses of stress.

Further research is now needed to correlate variation in dental cortisol concentrations with stress experience.Using 200 early-forming teeth from archaeological and living populations, the aims of this project are 1) to validate the current methods for assessing dental cortisol; 2) to assess potential sex-based differences in cortisol in primary teeth; and 3) compare dental cortisol data with known episodes of stress in living individuals and plague-related mass graves in the St.

Plten-Domplatz cemetery.

The emphasis on exploring cortisol embedded in teeth during prenatal and early life stages is due to the dramatic and enduring effects of maternal and early-life stress on health and wellbeing throughout the life course.

This research has the potential to provide new ways to understand the skeletal embodiment of stress in past, present and future populations.