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The Bling of the Ancients
If you think hip-hop stars like Flavor Flav started the craze of jewel-studded teeth, you'd be wrong. A new study shows that Native Americans were using sophisticated dentistry techniques to add bling to their smiles 2,500 years ago. These ancient people used notches, grooves, and semiprecious gems to beautify their teeth. According to the study, the dentistry was for purely cosmetic purposes. "They were not marks of social class," says José Concepción Jiménez, an anthropologist at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.
Maybe they should have increased their weapons research budget instead.
Hmm. Methinks that all cosmetics are about improving your social class, and the quality of those cosmetics indicates which social class you can get away with claiming to be part of.
"They were not marks of social class"
Well, that's not surprising. They aren't now, either.
I am going to guess you never tried coke in college.
That fun powder is made from coca leaves which would be fine for numbing teeth for dental work.
Social class means different things to an anthropologist. He most likely means that this form of decoration was not reserved for a privileged group, such as chiefs, witchdoctors or priests. It may well have only been the better off tribesmen doing, but it was not restricted to one class or another.
And he knows this HOW?
One of the great things about New World archeology is that so little is known that it's easy for experts to project their hopes, dreams and fears onto their finds.
Because we have a reasonable idea of what was going on in Europe and Asia and Africa 2500 years ago anyone suggesting the use of cosmetic dentistry for reasons other than expression of social class, wealth, power, etc would be laughed at. But our ignorance of New World peoples is vast, so they make a convenient armature to hang Euro-centric notions of "noble savages" and "peaceful kingdoms" on.
For example, the Inca--now known to be a violent, war-making civilization that was structured into an oppressive aristocracy over a downtrodden peasantry--were once believed to be entirely peaceful and relatively egalitarian. That was back in the '50's when global war was a great fear, and the myth of a "classless society" was still widely believed.
Those false beliefs eventually yielded to fact, particularly translation of the Incan language. Today, though, if you ask an "expert" what the Inca were worried about toward the end of their empire, they'll be apt to tell you with a straight face, "climate change, soil erosion, ecological degradation..." Whereas the honest answer is, "We don't have a clue. Who knows what people whose entire conceptual universe is still barely comprehensible to us were thinking. Probably that they had displeased the gods somehow because things kept getting worse, but even that's just a guess."
We do know there are some constants in human society. All societies have adultery, for example, and all societies have some form of conspicuous consumption or other flagrantly wasteful behaviour that is used as a marker of class, power, wealth, etc.
When a novel social phenomenon is found in an otherwise little-understood or little-known society, it is a good bet that it'll have something to do with one of those basic, common things. At least we have good reason to believe that they existed, rather than positing that a difficult and dangerous ornamental display is for the first time ever anywhere not related to expressing the social class, power, wealth, etc of the individual involved.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.