1. Polished horse teeth (2)
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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2018 13:54:39 +0000
From: Andy Clarke <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Polished horse teeth
Hey guys,
Here's one for a Friday afternoon.
I have a context dated to the Middle Iron Age and from it I have the remains of a horse skull and mandible. The bone is highly fragmented but some pieces show possible polishing, especially on the mandible fragments. But what stands out are the teeth. The occlusal surface of the molars show a fair amount of polishing but it is the sides (both buccal and lingual) that display an almost mirror-like level of polishing.
I am pretty inexperienced when it comes to horses when they are alive, but could the silica in the grass they eat do this?
Two other thing spring to mind -
1. the environment the bones were deposited in has caused this by exposure to the elements/running water.
2. This horse skull was curated in some way and the polishing is deliberate.
Any thoughts ?
As always, many thanks in advance for your help.
Cheers
Andy
Andy Clarke
Post-Excavation Archaeologist
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Hi Andy,
Where was the deposition? If it was in the UK, I’m not knowledgeable as to Iron Age horse management methods. My area of expertise is Iron Age Inner Asia (steppe and Southern Siberia). To respond to Deb, within that context horses were neither kept in dry lots, nor grained.
Also, have you been able to age the horse? For what it’s worth, I will say that when one of my horses, a stallion, was close to 30 years old, he lost a molar in his water trough. I kept it, and it is highly polished on all sides and more yellowish than younger horses’ teeth, rather like a carved ivory netsuke. The tooth was relatively worn down and short, but not abnormally worn (no hooks or points). He was not fed barley, or any other grain. and was not kept in a stall.
Best,
Gala
Dr. Gala Argent
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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2018 11:40:12 -0700
From: Deb Bennett <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Polished horse teeth
Andy, in all likelihood the polishing is due to the horse being fed barley. Even today, when you go to the store and buy flour – of wheat, barley, rye, or any other grain -- the package or the sack will have a mark on it thus: XXX. This means “sifted three times”, i.e., to get stones and sand and silt out. This system of marking goes back to Roman times at least. So, even then, a more costly sack of grain or flour would be marked by the miller ‘XXX’. Less costly grain, eaten by the lower classes, would be marked ‘XX’. The cheapest grain, intended for consumption by pigs or horses, would be ‘X’ or not sifted at all.
As all grass contains biogenic silica spicules, and we do not normally see polishing on horse teeth such as you describe, it can’t be due to that. Rather, the polishing is due to grain feeding, especially barley, and especially barley that carries with it a certain amount of grit in the form of silt- and clay-sized particles. Under some very unusual climatic and husbandry circumstances, i.e. where grass is irrigated and grown in a place, such as the Central Valley of California, where wind can blow fine grit onto the wet grass, to which it sticks – and then horses come along and graze the muddy grass -- under these rare circumstances you can get the same type of polishing. But the ‘mirror finish’ you describe is much more likely to be due to the animal being grain-fed with ‘animal-grade’ grain.
Now, sitting here blind, I will also make a prediction: the horse jaw(s) or even individual teeth that you have, that show the polish, will be malocclusive in some way, i.e. they will have irregular, abnormal wear – in equine dentist slang, ‘wave mouth’, ‘points’, ‘hooks’, ‘shear’, or the like – steep, sharp, irregular occlusal surfaces. The reason I predict this is that abnormal tooth wear resulting in malocclusion(s) are a usual sequel to grain feeding. The more the horse is kept in a stall or small paddock without grass (a ‘dry lot’), and the less he is let out to graze, the higher the frequency of malocclusions. The stall-kept horse is the horse who eats primarily processed feed, i.e. hay or grain, which do not engage the incisor teeth and which the horse chews with an altered stroke, thus opening the way to disequilibration of the bite and grind.
The stall-kept horse is also usually the more expensive horse, the commandant’s or the colonel’s horse, or the king’s; and the irony is that it will be the enlisted man’s mount, or that of the peasant, which is daily turned out upon the common and which eats a relatively normal diet in a normal way, by putting its head down and pulling/tearing grass blades off with the incisor teeth, that has a normal bite and grind. The rich guy’s horse has the malocclusions. So another thing to do, if you have a lot of specimens, is to see what percentage are polished and/or maloccluding/abnormal in the type of wear – because in any society, rich guys are the “one percent”.
Let me know if Karnak was correct about the malocclusions/abnormal wear. Cheers – Dr. Deb
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