Painkillers? Pierced teeth pendants as amulets
Museums and excavation reports from Roman Britain often contain a reference to a pierced animal tooth, perhaps used as an amulet. The tooth is usually a dog’s canine, though wolf canine, sheep incisor, bear canine, and pig/boar tusk also feature. What is abundantly unclear, however, is what these things were supposed to be used for.
Fig.1: A pierced canine canine (ha!) on display at Verulamium Museum.
Pierced dog’s teeth are referenced by Pliny (HN 11.63) as a ‘valuable amulet’, particularly efficacious for use with curing ‘childish terrors’ and as a medicine for teething (HN 28.78). He also mentions other possible uses for the teeth of horses (ibid.) and crocodiles (HN 28.28), the former performing similar functions to the pierced dog’s teeth and the latter as an aphrodisiac or as part of a ritual cure for fever.
It is one reference, but let’s run with it for the purposes of academic curiosity to see where it leads.
At the outset I should point out that other materia medica had been suggested for this purpose. For example, Dioscorides (De materia medica 1.71) suggested that
“teething and the itching that this causes are relieved if you smear butter on the child’s gums, either by itself or mixed with honey; The broiled brains of a hare, rubbed on and then swallowed, are equally effective. Eating a boiled mouse also helps…”
Both ideas appear in the 3rd century work of Serenus Sammonicus (Liber medicinalis 58.1029):
“A cure for teething: nature sends mankind in to the world naked at first. She then afflicts us with torture when she arms us with snow-white teeth. So bind round your child’s soft neck a horse’s teeth, the first teeth that fall out as a foal grows bigger. Or smear the child’s tender gums with the brains of a pig or of a hare, or with the snow-white milk of shaggy she-goats”
Looking into this, let’s start with some essentialism: teething hurts and there is very little that can be done to alleviate it. The NHS provides the following symptoms:
your baby’s gum is sore and red where the tooth is coming through
one cheek is flushed
your baby is dribbling more than usual
they are gnawing and chewing on things a lot
they are more fretful than usual
Teething is a variable process: some babies are born with their first teeth, otherwise the process may begin at 4 to 12 months of age and it may be entirely painless or partly/thoroughly painful. The early imperial writer Soranus mentions the occurrence of teething at about the 7th month (Gyn. 2.49) and suggests that massage of the gums may help, also that the use of a piece of animal fat from which the infant may suck the moisture is a good idea. Between Soranus, Dioscorides, and Pliny then we have two major modus operadi for alleviating the pain of teething: something soft and moist placed in the mouth as a lubricant, or the use of an amulet. Pliny isn’t revealing on where the pierced teeth should be placed, but that issue raises further interesting questions.
Let’s start with the animals – dogs & sheep primarily. Well, dogs are easily linked to medical practice through being particularly associated with Asclepius and considered to be possessed of healing qualities (Jackson 1988, 142). Sheep are more difficult, but the teeth we find pierced are the front incisors. No coincidence perhaps, that it is the incisors that are the first teeth to appear in humans? I’ll ignore the bear and pig/boar for this blog as they are differently sized pendants attached in different ways, and focus on the dog and sheep teeth because they are very similarly sized and, when pierced, almost always singly and through the root rather than the cap. How they work is certainly a different matter; we can infer a level of sympathetic magic – like cures like. Perhaps the adult tooth, disassociated from its original owner, was designed to focus the pain within itself, or to encourage the child’s teeth somehow. Within only a couple of lines I can only speculate, but suffice to say that within the panoply of Roman magical and medicinal materials, it doesn’t seem out of place.
Looking briefly at where these things come from in Roman Britain, it is clear they turn up in ones or twos from single sites, mainly the urban settlements. Of the 82 so far gathered as part of my PhD research, 23 come from stratified contexts ranging from the mid-1st to the later 4th centuries AD, with a tentative skew towards the first two centuries AD.
Fig.1: An impenetrable heatmap showing the distribution of pierced teeth pendants in Roman Britain: they’re pretty much everywhere.
Accepting that pierced teeth pendants are potentially used for the treatment of problems with teething, we must question the point at which such an object was employed. Were they used in the weeks or months before it was presumed to begin (the application of prior knowledge by the biological mother, her own mother, or a midwife may be utilised here)? From birth? Only once the teeth start showing? Only once pain began? Perhaps of most importance is the question of ‘who is wearing the amulet?’, child or adult?
Whether a small infant would ever wear a necklace is open for discussion. Infants begin to place hands and nearby objects into their mouths during this ‘transitional feeding stage’ at about 6 months of age (Arvedson 2006, Table 3) so a small tooth nearby could present a choking hazard, unless it or the child was somehow immobilised. The young toddlers depicted on the Ara Pacis are shown to be wearing bullae, which are much larger than the pierced teeth pendants and worn at an age where it may be more appropriate to do so. Newborns may have been swaddled; there is both literary and visual evidence to suggest this may have occurred for about the first 40-60 days (Soranus, Gyn. 2.14; Croom 2000, 117-118). This is most likely to have occurred before the child had teeth, but would have allowed for a small amulet to be attached easily to a child. Bullae strung on long suspension straps and other chains of pendants are depicted on ceramic votives of swaddled infants from Paestum in the final three centuries BC (Ammerman 2007, 142f, figs. 7.12-14, 7.16-17).
Teething is closely associated with weaning, though the two processes are not necessarily concurrent. Soranus (Gyn. 2.47) suggests that breastfeeding continues, with supplements of solid food, up to the age of 18-24 months. An isotopic study of infant feeding practices in Roman London supports the idea that breastfeeding occurs at the very early stages in the life of the infants sampled and also that it continued to form part of the diet during a very gradual weaning process lasting, in some cases, up to the age of three years (Powell et al. 2014, 101).
The dual process of weaning and teething may in fact result in pain for both the infant and the adult if she remained breastfeeding during this time. It is worth considering that the tooth may, in fact, have been worn by the adult during this period – for example, if on a necklace and worn at the chest it could be encompassed between mother and child during the process of breastfeeding. Could both wear one? Perhaps a matching set from a single animal – left and right together? Or different animals for adult and child?
I’ve raised the question of temporal use here – was there a specific time where it was more, or less appropriate to use such a pendant? Well, presumably the efficacy is limited to the time that the child is teething (unless the teeth were possessed of alternative sympathetic properties), but was it worn only when the pain flared up or all the time? Likewise, if the adult wears it, is this likewise subjected to specific times?
Beyond the immediate use for one child, within a family was a new tooth required for each new child or could they be recycled? If the latter, might such teeth have been curated and used for multiple children, multiple families and even multiple generations? Did the family have to acquire the teeth from the animal itself or should we presume a trade in these animal parts?
Clearly many questions about the use of such a pendant can be posed and we can only speculate at the point of deployment for an appropriate apotropaic pendant. The fact that the teething process may be entirely painless could establish links between a pendant and its efficacy in stopping pain. Re-using such pendants for additional infants (assuming there is not a destructive element in the life-course of the object, i.e. it is destroyed once teething is over – there is no clear evidence for this), this may create a familial or interpersonal link between the object and the individuals involved establishing a shared memory experience between the object and its action (see Graham 2011, 25ff). In such circumstances the retention of the tooth pendant may not be surprising. Teething is, potentially, a very sensory experience; an upset, screaming, red-faced, dribbling infant is undoubtedly a worrying prospect for a parent and the opportunity to attempt to resolve such problems no doubt would be pursued.
I’ve raised many unanswered questions here, but I will be discussing them in greater detail with my paper at the MagiCog: Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Magic Conference at the ICS, London in January 2019.
Bibliography:
Ammerman, R. M. 2007. ‘Children at Risk: Votive Terracottas and the Welfare of Infants at Paestum’, Hesperia Supplements 41 (Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy). The American School of Classical Studies at Athens. 131-151.
Arvedson, J. C. 2006. ‘Swallowing and feeding in infants and young children’, GI Motility Online [doi:10.1038/gimo17] (accessed 22/07/2016)
Croom, A. T. 2000. Roman Clothing and Fashion. Stroud, Tempus.
Graham, E-J. 2011. ‘Memory and materiality: re-embodying the Roman funeral’, in Hope, V. M. and Huskinson, J. (eds) Memory and Mourning: Studies on Roman Death. Oxford, Oxbow. 23-39.
Jackson, R. 1988. Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire. London, British Museum.
Powell, L. A., Redfern, R., Millard, A. R., and Gröcke, D. R. 2014. ‘Infant feeding practices in Roman London: evidence from isotopic analyses’, in Carroll, M. and Graham, E-J. (eds) Infant Health and Death in Roman Italy and Beyond (JRA Supplementary Series 96). Portsmouth, Rhode Island, Journal of Roman Archaeology. 89-110.
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