This study analyses dental wear of children and adolescents from the Late Bronze Age kurgans of the Middle Volga and Southern Ural regions (N = 97). The rate of wear in this sample was compared with a Post-Medieval rural sample from Netherlands. A modified Smith’s scale was used, adapted for two sets of teeth. Wear scores were strongly correlated with age, both when analyzing groups of teeth separately and when scores were averaged for each individual. The studied Volga-Ural sample had a significantly higher rate of dental wear compared to the rural sample from the Netherlands, due to higher average scores between 7–14 years of age and lower scores below 7 years of age. The observed intersection of regression lines may be either due to biological or methodological causes. In general, there is some trend towards lower level of wear of deciduous teeth in the Volga-Ural sample compared to a few samples from the literature, which is consistent with the hypothesis of lower attrition rates in pastoralists. It is essential to expand comparative data using the same scoring technique, as well as to address a number of methodological issues related to the simultaneous analysis of two sets of teeth.

Keywords: Volga-Ural region, Pre-Urals, Trans-Urals, srubnaya culture, srubnaya-alakul cultural type, diet, dental pathologies.

 

Funding. This study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), project № 22-18-00194 “The Epochal transformation of the cultural and physical appearance of the population of the south of the Middle Volga region and Cis-Urals region in the Neolithic and Early Iron Age according to archeological, anthropological and genetics sources”.

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Accepted: 13.10.2024

Article is published: 15.03.2025