Patterns of dental enamel defects at ancient Mendes, Egypt

The dental remains of 88 individuals from Old Kingdom, First Intermediate, and Greco-Roman periods at the ancient Egyptian site of Mendes (Tell er-Rub (c)a) were examined for dental enamel hypoplasia, and the results reported here provide some of the first comparative data on enamel defects in ancien t Egypt. Overall, 48% of the individuals in the sample have one or more tee th with hypoplasia, with 17% of permanent teeth and 8% of deciduous teeth a ffected. The permanent teeth account for 87% of the total number of affecte d teeth, a prevalence over deciduous teeth that is significant at alpha = 0 .05. Permanent and deciduous teeth display different patterns of hypoplasia , with the former exhibiting both discrete pitting and linear furrowing, an d the latter exhibiting only pits. Teeth with linear defects significantly outnumber those with pits by a factor of more than three to one. Only perma nent canines display more than one lesion on a tooth, with a mean of 1.4 de fects per affected tooth. Although calculation of the age of insult from le sion position is imprecise, it appears that stress episodes occurred most c ommonly between approximately 3-5 years of age. The presence of pits in the deciduous dentition, however, suggests that physiological stresses began i n utero. There is no statistically significant difference in the frequency of enamel defects between males and females. An observed decrease in the fr equency of defects from the Old Kingdom period to the subsequent First Inte rmediate and Greco-Roman periods is not significant at alpha = 0.05, althou gh such a decrease is expected given epigraphic and other data that refer t o prolonged drought and malnutrition in the late Old Kingdom. The calculate d chi(2) value of 3.83 is significant at the 0.10 level, however, and since our sample is rather small and the magnitude of the chi-square statistic i s a function of sample size, we recommend that future research investigate further the relationship between the frequency of enamel defects and the ti me period in which they occur. (C) 1999 Wiley-Liss, Inc.