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REVIEW BY JOSHUA T SCHNELL
The decorated smiles of the ancient Maya, characterised by their carved, incised, and inlaid dental arches, have long fascinated those who have gazed on them, inspiring more than a century of scholarly research. Vera Tiesler is the world’s foremost expert on these dental modifications, and Ancient Maya Teeth is the product of a career dedicated to better understanding the dental arts of the Maya. The book begins with a loving reflection on her own career and some of the great scholars of Mesoamerican Indigenous dentistry that came before, including a brief history of biological anthropology as it developed in Mexico. Throughout, Tiesler masterfully captures the full breadth, scope, and cutting-edge nature of scholarship on ancient Maya teeth today.
The book draws on hundreds of published works, decades of collaborative research, and a comprehensive dataset of nearly 4,000 contextualised sets of dental remains, bringing together the largest body of data on the topic yet published. Within its pages, Tiesler traces the history, process, and trends of Maya dental arts from their earliest beginnings in Mesoamerica, through the Classic period, and beyond the Spanish arrival in the Yucatán. One of the most compelling contributions in this book is Tiesler’s consideration of the life cycle of an embellished smile, including the age at which these modifications first occurred and how they might have been altered or touched up as the individual aged. Indeed, this is the first major work to popularise and bring attention to the routine upkeep of these crafted dental arcades, and to consider the role of additional forms of modification such as tooth-polishing. This book also prominently features a signature element of Tiesler’s approach, that of considering the crafted dental arcade as a whole rather than as individual modified teeth.
Ancient Maya Teeth is a reflection of Tiesler’s dedication to understanding the cultural underpinnings of Maya body arts, rooted in the images, writing, and ethnobiology of the ancient Maya themselves rather than a Western-biased perspective on what it might mean to modify the mouth. Here, Tiesler takes a distinctive culturally grounded, or emic, perspective, offering a comprehensive analysis of Maya dental modifications as not merely aesthetic choices but as embodied expressions of identity, status, and cosmological beliefs. Significant attention is paid to the meaning of the mouth, oral cavity, and teeth themselves within the Maya worldview, while also considering the unique role the mouth plays as a biological interface between the self, the social world, and the unseen metaphysical world.
Lavishly illustrated and with a richly compelling narrative, Ancient Maya Teeth is accessible to a wide audience. Despite this general accessibility, some elements of Tiesler’s discussion of the cultural specifics of Maya dental arts may be a bit hard to follow for those not already familiar with Maya art, archaeology, and iconography. However, those interested in learning more can follow Tiesler’s robust citations and footnotes.
This book is an essential read for those interested in bioarchaeology, the ancient Maya, or Mesoamerica more broadly, as well as body-art practices and the ways in which humans have historically used their bodies as canvases for cultural expression. It will remain the go-to text on Maya dental modifications for many years to come.
Ancient Maya Teeth: dental modification, cosmology, and social identity in Mesoamerica
Vera Tiesler
University of Texas Press, £52
ISBN 978-1477328842
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