Tandhälsan i Västergarns Schakt 27

The mass grave in Västergarn, Gotland, Sweden is located between two medieval churches and thought to be a bone depot from when one of the churches expanded their wall in more recent time. The bone depot is problematic in a way because it could contain individuals from a wide time frame, making it hard to ask certain questions regarding how the individuals lived and died. Also conducting individual studies of the skeletons is hard since the osteological material is highly fragmented and the individual graves has been disturbed post burial. Therefore this osteological study will not focus on studying the health of the people individual by individual, but rather examine the permanent teeth of this material and then apply statistics to study the overall oral health of Västergarns mass grave. Enquiries regarding tooth health and how people experienced their life because of it, are questions that I will be trying to answer in this study. A deeper and thorough investigation regarding certain teeth conditions such as dental calculus, caries, enamel hypoplasia as well as mechanical damage will be conducted. There will also be comparisons between other historic locations in Sweden such as Uppsala, Skara and the older cemetery and its ruin in Västergarn. Last but not least a discussion regarding the difficulty of examining a diverse material with different timeframes