Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
At first glance, there was nothing unusual-looking about the old tooth, or the skeleton of the woman it came from. Neither tooth nor bones showed signs of deformity, disease, or trauma.
The tooth was pointy, yellowed, average—and that’s exactly why scientists wanted a closer look.The plan had been to use the tooth—buried with its onetime owner in a monastery cemetery in Dalheim, Germany in the 11th or early 12th century—to better understand diet and health in the Middle Ages. Teeth, particularly gunk-encrusted ones, can reveal all sorts of habits and behaviors, because tartar, or hardened plaque, is “the only part of your body that fossilizes when you’re still alive,” says Christina Warinner, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. Bacteria, pollen, and little bits of food can all be trapped in this matrix, making teeth “a little time capsule of your life history,” she says. While archaeologists are often focused on pottery sherds or pieces of metal or stone, Warinner adds, “small artifacts, the kind that are too small to see, often preserve better than anything else.” As the team would discover, this microscopic debris can hold puzzles and clues about life and labor centuries ago.
Warinner and her collaborators first looked at the tooth, from the woman designated B78, under a microscope for a window into the daily life of the women who lived and worked in the small monastery. But the researchers soon realized they were looking at something more unusual. According to Warinner, her colleague Anita Radini, an archaeologist at the University of York, said, “I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s blue.” At first, Warinner thought this might be an exaggeration—maybe it was just a little grayish? But it turned out to be flecked with bits that were resplendently, unmistakably blue—the color of a cloudless sky. “Under the microscope,” Warinner says, “it was clear [B78] had been rather extraordinary.”
Radini, Warinner, and their team analyzed some of the several hundred blue particles suspended in B78’s hardened plaque, and determined them to be lazurite, the naturally occurring mineral that gives lapis lazuli its brilliant blue hue. They suspected that the crystals came from interacting with a rich ultramarine pigment, made by grinding lapis lazuli into a fine powder. The semiprecious stone had been traded into Europe from Afghanistan,…
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