Ethnodentistry and Dental Folklore by William Carter

In our analysis, we draw on data from archaeology, osteology, taphonomy, iconography, ethnohistory, and ethnography. To make our case, we reconstruct the ideology of these mortuary practices through the study of 12 burials from El Kinel. Over the course of this chapter, we argue that mortuary rites served to both (re)constitute society at El Kinel and reified that community’s participation within the greater Yaxchilan polity of the eighth century AD. We explore the inhumation (and occasional exhumation) of the dead within the framework of ritual practice at El Kinel, Guatemala. The results of this study demonstrate the culturally meaningful patterns that can emerge when unusual or “problematical” deposits are carefully analyzed and culturally-grounded. By building analogy between contemporary Maya practices of commerce and healing today, colonial medical and commercial sources, and the archaeological record, this study explores a previously archaeologically undocumented practice among the Classic Maya and contextualizes ancient medical practice within the social and economic space of an ancient Maya marketplace.

Beginning with the identification of dental extractions in this area on the basis of the pathological and fractured state of the human teeth, this thesis investigates the intersection between medicine and curing and commerce and exchange. This area of the site has been hypothesized to have served market functions. A large, fragmentary, and commingled assemblage of human and animal bone worked and unworked bone, and pathological human teeth was excavated from the S-Sector of Piedras Negras, Guatemala between 20.

Ethnodentistry and Dental Folklore by William Carter