Maya Children Also Received Dental Inlays

Common within Maya culture was the practice of dental modification, which usually involved filing teeth into distinctive shapes, engraving designs, or drilling holes and embedding stones such as jade or pyrite. Scholars had previously thought that these procedures were only performed on adults, but Phys.org reports that a new study suggests for the first time that some children may have also participated in the ritual. The evidence came from three Maya teeth inlaid with jade stones that are in the collections of Francisco Marroquín University's Popol Vuh Museum. Researchers recently reexamined the teeth -- a maxillary central left incisor, a...