Western University of Health Sciences

Matt Wedel

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A new book is out from Cambridge University Press, *Dental Cementum in
Anthropology*, edited by Stephan Naji, William Rendu, and Lionel
Gourichon. Although human teeth are not my area of expertise, I ended up
coauthoring the twelfth chapter of the book, "Tooth cementum annulations
method for determining age at death using modern deciduous human teeth:
challenges and lessons learned". Of all of my publications, this one is
the hardest to write about. In part that's because our original project
failed, for various reasons that we document in the chapter, and the
final publication is mostly a catalog of things not to do. But more
importantly, it's because Vicki Wedel, the lead author and my spouse of
nearly 25 years, passed away unexpectedly last May.

I haven't written here about Vicki's passing because I've never been
sure what to say. Other than two memorial ceremonies last year and a
handful of Facebook posts in the month or so after, I haven't talked
about it in public at all. I hoped that I'd know what to say by the time
that the book chapter was published, but here we are, and words still
feel like grotesquely inadequate tools with which to sketch the
horrifying suddenness and totality of the loss. I thought that time
would dull the edge of grief, but it doesn't hurt any less 10 months
after, it just hurts less often. I haven't become numb to any of the
obvious triggers, I've just gotten good at side-stepping them. All that
means is that it's a cruel surprise when, at unpredictable and frequent
intervals, grief sidles up and slips a dagger between my ribs.

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Vicki and I met in high school, when we were both 16. We dated for five
years, and got married when we were 21. Professionally, she was always
ahead of me: she earned her bachelor's degree first, and her master's,
and her doctorate; presented at a conference before I did, and traveled
internationally, and published a journal article, and a
[book](https://svpow.com/2013/12/18/vickis-book-broken-bones-is-out/);
got a tenure-track job first, and mentored a graduate student first. Far
from being resentful, I was emboldened by her successes in every one of
those arenas, and grateful for her example and her encouragement. She
passed on May 15, 2021, three weeks short of our 25th wedding
anniversary, and five months before our 30th anniversary as a couple. 

As a forensic anthropologist, Vicki was frequently asked how she wanted
to die. Her standard answer was that she wanted to go quietly in her
sleep, at home, in clean clothes; to be found almost immediately by
family; and to be conveyed rapidly to a funeral home. The timing was
nothing that any of us had imagined or hoped for, but in the actual
event she got everything she had wanted, and that is no small comfort.
She went out at the apex of her personal and professional development,
with no decline and no suffering, which is something that most of us
will not get.

Vicki and I daydreamed of coauthoring papers together, and we always
figured we'd get around to it eventually, although we both expected that
any joint publications would be on dinosaur bone histology (she was the
hard-tissue histologist, I would have supplied the dinosaurs). In the
actual event, she was working on a project to determine age at death of
human adolescents by counting cementum bands in deciduous teeth ('baby
teeth'), and she hit a wall transmuting the results into a discussion. I
volunteered to help with that, and pretty soon I'd gotten sucked into
being genuinely interested in the problem that she was up against.

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The development and loss of deciduous teeth restrict cementochronology
to the interval in which the root apex is complete. (Wedel et al. 2022:
fig. 12.1)
:::

I've written here before about the method of counting dental cementum
bands, which are laid down annually, to determine age and season at
death ([this
post](https://svpow.com/2013/02/26/37-year-old-cold-case-id/)). Vicki
wanted to know if that method, which she'd used successfully on
permanent teeth, would work on deciduous teeth. That turns out to be a
surprisingly tricky problem, for several reasons. One of the foremost
reasons is sampling. Human deciduous teeth have three fates:

1.  Most deciduous teeth complete development normally, which means that
    the roots are resorbed and the teeth fall out. The resorption of the
    root destroys the cementum bands, so there's nothing to study. 
2.  Some deciduous teeth are retained in the jaw instead of being
    resorbed, and usually these retained teeth are pulled by dentists
    when it becomes clear that they are not going to fall out on their
    own. Practically by definition, these retained teeth do not
    represent the typical course of development --- not great when
    you're trying to validate a method on 'normal' samples.
3.  Tragically, some deciduous teeth stop developing because they belong
    to people who die as children or adolescents. For reasons of privacy
    and respect for grieving loved ones these teeth are rarely used in
    research, and they don't represent a controlled sample anyway. The
    remains of children from archaeological sites have the additional
    problem that there's often no good independent line of evidence for
    age at death, which makes them useless for a validation study.

As we put it in the chapter, "normal, healthy deciduous teeth are
unlikely to be extracted, and extracted deciduous teeth are therefore
unlikely to be normal".

We did have some deciduous teeth, culled from a sample of more than 1000
teeth collected by dentists at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska,
and sent to Vicki by her collaborator, Ken Hermsen, who coauthored the
chapter with us. Unfortunately, the methods that had worked so well for
Vicki on adult teeth broke down when applied to deciduous teeth, in
multiple ways that left us scratching our heads and chasing phantoms. I
won't go through the whole litany of failures here --- it's too
depressing, and I already coauthored a whole chapter about it. Suffice
it to say that peer review worked in this case, when an anonymous
reviewer caught and called attention to our errors. We were ready to
shelve the chapter, but lead editor Stephan Naji encouraged us to not
let all our effort go to waste. About all we could do in the remaining
time was catalog the stuff we'd done wrong, so...that's the paper. It's
very much an 'eating our vegetables' affair, but hopefully it will steer
future researchers away from the reefs that our original study foundered
on. I'm grateful to Stephan for the opportunity to publish --- not least
because it would be my last chance to collaborate with my partner ---
and for the lovely words about Vicki that he wrote in the dedication of
the book.

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It is supremely bittersweet that Vicki and I finally got to coauthor
something, only for it to come out when she's no longer around to see
it. It also hit me with unexpected force that with the publication of
this book, Vicki's scientific legacy is almost complete (there is one
more collaboration, with folks other than me, that will hopefully still
get published). Like many things related to her passing, those thoughts
don't point anywhere. There's no neat resolution, no bow to tie things
up with. Sometimes things just stop, awkwardly and before their time,
and there's nothing to do but go on.

## Reference

Wedel†, V., Hermsen, K., & Wedel, M. 2022. Tooth cementum annulations
method for determining age at death using modern deciduous human teeth:
challenges and lessons learned. pp. 215-225 in Naji, S., Rendu, W., and
Gourichon, L. (eds.), *Dental Cementum in Anthropology*. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, UK. doi:10.1017/9781108569507.014


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New book chapter: challenges of studying dental cementum in deciduous teeth

My spouse, Vicki, the other Dr. Wedel, is a physical and forensic anthropologist. And she’s one of a very small number of scientists who have (a) learned something new about the human body, and (b) used it to help identify dead people.

jfo_546 1..4

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Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

New book chapter: challenges of studying dental cementum in deciduous teeth

Using tooth histology to help identify a murder victim in a 37-year-old cold case