The graves of Domkyrkoplan - life and dental health in early modern Uppsala.

This essay is a study of the dental health and cranial pathologies of five individuals buried in Domkyrkoplan cemetery, Uppsala, in the 17th and 18th century. Domkyrkoplan was the only cemetery in Uppsala city during the 200-year time period. The cemetery was placed in the immediate surroundings of Uppsala cathedral. The 17th century is a breaking point between the late medieval society and the early modern era in Sweden as well as in Europe, and this was a period of change for the inhabitants of Uppsala city. The purpose of this paper is to provide a deeper insight into the inhabitants’ health and life, as well as an overview of the town’s development over the course of the time period. The theoretical framework used in this essay is microarchaeology, and the results from the analysis apply only to the analyzed individuals. Although no attempt will be made to draw conclusions about the entire population of Uppsala during the early modern times, the results will be placed in a historical context. The historical context provided in this essay is the result of a literary analysis with three major focal points: demography and city planning, Uppsala cathedral and the cemetery, diet and health. The results of the osteological analysis have shown that the five individuals all suffered from malnutrition and/or iron deficiency at some point during their childhood. The individuals are believed to have belonged to the middle class in the early modern society, however, they seem to have lived through some sort of hardship which caused the malnutrition. The literary analysis concludes that Uppsala was subjected to a starvation catastrophe during the last years of the 17th century, as well as the plague shortly thereafter, in 1710. The osteological material analyzed in this essay is part of an ongoing archaeological investigation, which means that the dating and results used or concluded in this essay is preliminary and may differ from the final archaeological report, which will be released in 2021