The Monti'e Prama (Cabras, Sardinia) necropolis, X- IX sec. A.C.: the age at death by teeth as a contribution to an archaeological question.

The Monti 'e Prama site, made famous by the discovery of numerous large stone statues "The Monti 'e Prama giants", is a necropolis located in Sardinia, dated to the X - IX BC. The statues, all depicting men: archers, boxers and fencers, were found collapsed and fragmented, in the immediate vicinity of the burials. The sample of inhumated skeletons consists of 41 individuals, almost all males, who died when adolescents, young adults or, more rarely, mature. Neither children nor elders were present. An interesting question is whether the statues depicted the deceased or could have come from a temple located elsewhere. In this regard, the diagnosis of the age at death is an element of considerable importance, but the skeletal age is difficult to determine in this sample because of the bad state of preservation of the bones, while the teeth are well preserved and have allowed us to reconstruct a seriation in order to seniority on the basis of wear. Since tooth wear is a weak indicator of age, we also used a method based on the deposition of secondary dentine, by the pulp area/tooth area ratio calculation, which gets a greater precision. It was found that the correlation between the degree of wear and pulp area/tooth area ratio is somewhat low, indicating that the two processes, although both age-dependent, do not have a very similar trend. It was also noted that the method of pulp area / tooth area ratio tends to "make the individuals grow old" in cases of discrepancy, but in general confirms the young age of many adults and the absence of the elderly. In this sense, it confirms even the possibility of an association between the deceased and the statues of young athletes or warriors. The results of pulp area/tooth area ratio method, by moving the sample as a whole to ages slightly more advanced than those suggested by wear, offers the hypothesis that the community was characterized by alimentary habits involving a little wearing mastication activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]