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Ancient Maya Teeth
Dental Modification, Cosmology, and Social Identity in Mesoamerica
Vera Tiesler
University of Texas Press, 2024

A study of Maya dental modification from archaeological sites spanning three millennia.

Dental modification was common across ancient societies, but perhaps none were more avid practitioners than the Maya. They filed their teeth flat or pointy, polished and drilled them, and crafted decorative inlays of jade and pyrite. Unusually, Maya of all social classes, ages, and professions engaged in dental modification. What did it mean to them?

Ancient Maya Teeth is the most comprehensive study of Maya dental modification ever published, based on thousands of teeth recovered from 130 sites spanning three millennia. Esteemed archaeologist Vera Tiesler sifts the evidence, much of it gathered with her own hands and illustrated here with more than a hundred photographs. Exploring the underlying theory and practice of dental modification, Tiesler raises key questions. How did modifications vary across the individual’s lifespan? What tools were used? How did the Maya deal with pain—and malpractice? How did they keep their dentitions healthy, functioning, and beautiful? What were the relationships among gender, social identity, and particular dental-modification choices? Addressing these and other issues, Ancient Maya Teeth reveals how dental-modification customs shifted over the centuries, indexing other significant developments in Mayan cultural history.

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logo for Harvard University Press
Craniodental Variation Among the Great Apes
Akiko Uchida
Harvard University Press, 1996
Akiko Uchida’s detailed data descriptions and comprehensive analysis of living ape specimens from true biological populations make a significant contribution to understanding the systematics of living hominoids and interpreting the hominoid fossil record.
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Teeth
Aracelis Girmay
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Winner, 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry 

Stunning, highly original poems that celebrate the richness of the author's multicultural tradition, Teeth explores loves, wars, wild hope, defiance, and the spirit of creativity in a daring use of language and syntax. Behind this language one senses a powerful, inventive woman who is not afraid to tackle any subject, including rape, genocide, and love, always sustained by an optimistic voice, assuring us that in the end justice will triumph and love will persevere.

LOVE,
you be the reason why
we swagger & jive,

lift the guitar, & pick up the axe.
when it is i tilt my hat to the side,
wearing colors & perfumes, it's cause, love,
you did it to me. oh,
you do sure turn my tongue to fiddle,
& make the salt taste sweet. man,
i don't need a rooster, or peacock even,
to help me spend my time, nope,
just you, love, right & solid as
a line.

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The Teeth of the Souls
A Novel
Steve Yates
Moon City Press, 2015
As the sequel to Morkan’s Quarry, The Teeth of the Souls tells the story of a marriage betrayed, a lifelong and secret love, and an Ozarks city riven by an Easter lynching.
The story begins just after the Civil War when Leighton Shea Morkan, son of Irish immigrants, marries Patricia Grünhaagen Weitzer, daughter of a German banking family. Yet he can’t let go of his childhood love and wartime confidante, the house hand and former slave, Judith. Both unions produce children, one a shrouded secret, and one the heir to the Morkan legacy: the limestone quarries of Springfield, Missouri, and the bloody past, what Judith calls “The Teeth of the Souls.”

Grounded in broad historical research and spanning Missouri’s reconstruction, vigilantism, and fall from grace, The Teeth of the Souls chronicles the violent melding of immigrant strains—Irish, German, Scots-Irish, and African American—into the fabric of the Ozarks.
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