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Did Vikings Practice Dentistry?
Raiding, reaving, and root canals? A new study reveals a surprising fact about Viking history.
Vikings deserve their fame. They were relentless warriors whose raiding campaigns spread fear across Europe. They were innovative seafarers who populated Iceland and Greenland. They even landed on North America five centuries before Christopher Columbus. One thing the Vikings were not famous for is dentistry.
A new study by Carolina Bertilsson et al., published in the journal PLOS ONE, sheds light on whether we can add dentistry to the long list of accolades we usually grant to Vikings.
Bertilsson, an Associate Researcher in dentistry at the University of Gothenburg, sought to assess tooth wear and other dental pathologies in a known Viking population from Varnhem, Sweden. She used data from an excavated cemetery near the remains of an 11th century stone church. The church, modified from an earlier wooden version, is one of the oldest in Sweden.
The age of the remains in the cemetery date between the 10th and 12th century. The Viking Age lasted from the late 8th to the middle 11th century, so the cemetery’s inhabitants represent a contemporary and late-stage Viking population after its transition to Christianity.
