Price Samantha
Biography
My research uses ancient DNA analysis of dental calculus to explore the ancient oral microbiome. Dental calculus contains bacteria from the living oral microbiome and gives us information about an individual closer to their time of death than what we may gather from their skeleton. I will use this information from the oral microbiome to assess health and disease in Medieval European populations, in addition to exploring the potential pathogens these individuals were exposed to in order to explore this syndemic relationship between the oral microbiome and health in past populations.