Dental enamel hypoplasia and famines: physiological stress in 18th century Provence

International audienceDental linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) is a well-established physiologi-cal stress marker, which gives information about the stress someone suffers until age 7. In this presentation we analyse the occurrence of LEH in an archaeo-osteological collection of victims of the Great Plague of Marseilles (1720-1722, south of France), who went through several known starvation episodes before the plague epidemic. Con-sidering the historical and social contexts, our work aims at (1) verifying how each individual were affected by stress; (2) linking the stress epi-sode with the historically known famines, using the individual age at death; and (3) analysing how both genders were affected. In this pre-liminary study, we consider 60 individuals, including immatures and matures, in order to evaluate the pertinence of this analysis, which we intend to apply to the entire collection (n=200)