North Shields, north-east England, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The port expands, coal fuels local businesses and the fishing town begins to transform into an industrial center. Meanwhile, the climate gives no respite: Europe is going through the so-called Little Ice Age, a long period marked by particularly harsh winters, cold and rainy summers and large volcanic eruptions capable of influencing temperatures even thousands of kilometers away.
It is in this world that a little girl grows up destined to be buried, now an adult, in the small Quaker cemetery of Coach Lane. We don’t know her name, but her teeth have preserved something surprising: 18 episodes of altered mineralization, distributed from the first year of life up to eighteen years of age. Some were repeated almost punctually every year.
Two centuries later, those traces became the subject of a study conducted by Durham University and published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. Research suggests that the growth difficulties of children of the time, often associated withindustrial pollutionthey may also have been aggravated by the climate.
When teeth retain traces of a difficult childhood
In 2010 archaeologists unearthed 236 burials in the Coach Lane cemetery, used from 1711 to 1829. The skeletons featured numerous sany metabolic diseasesespecially among the little ones. In a previous sample of 63 children and teenagers, 44% showed signs of rickets, a condition that impairs bone development.
To better understand what happened during growth, researchers examined 30 teeth belonging to 21 people under the microscope. In 16 individuals, about 76% of the sample, they found alterations to the dentin, the tissue found under the enamel. These are small areas that have not mineralized properly. And teeth, unlike bones which are remodeled throughout life, retain these anomalies even after death. A kind of biological diary, in short, written while growing up.
In some individuals the changes appeared at almost annual intervals, suggesting recurrent difficulties in mineral metabolism. A possible explanation is the vitamin D deficiencyessential for absorbing calcium and developing healthy bones, even if dental anomalies alone are not enough to confirm it. But why did these difficulties seem to recur so regularly?
When volcanic eruptions darkened the European sky
To understand it we need to move away from England for a moment and reach Indonesia. In 1815 the Tambora volcano produced one of the most violent eruptions in recorded history. The enormous quantity of materials released into the atmosphere contributed to lower temperatures in various regions of the world. 1816 would go down in history as the year without summerwith abnormal cold, compromised crops and serious food difficulties. Tambora was just one of the volcanic episodes that affected the Little Ice Age. Added to these were long periods of reduced solar activity.
For children of the time, the problem could go beyond the cold. The skin produces vitamin D due to exposure to ultraviolet UVB rays. A lower availability of sunlight, accompanied by low temperatures and frequent rains, could push families to keep children indoors more and to cover them with warm clothes even during the normally more favorable months.
Archaeologists have found an interesting clue in the cemetery’s ancient records. Of the 109 individuals for whom it was possible to estimate the year of birth, 91, or 84%, were born during the period of a major volcanic eruption or in the following ten years. For 41 people, these periods also coincided with reduced solar activity. The registers do not allow individual names to be associated with the teeth examined, so the connection remains a hypothesis referring to the community as a whole. The coincidence, however, pushed scholars to reconsider the impact of the climate on health at the time.
Coal, factories and one more culprit
For a long time, rickets in industrial England was attributed primarily to coal smoke, long days spent indoors and the living conditions of working-class families. More than plausible reasons. Air pollution can reduce the amount of ultraviolet radiation reaching the ground, while a diet low in calcium and vitamin D increases the risk of bone problems.
In North Shields, however, scholars have noticed a peculiarity. Many of the testimonies describing the city suffocated by pollution date back to the mid-nineteenth century, when the Coach Lane cemetery had already stopped hosting burials for decades. Coal burned even before, certainly. But the worst documented industrial conditions belong to a later phase in the city’s history.
And when comparing skeletons from other European and North American communities, researchers found no consistent relationship between stunting, latitude, wealth, or industrialization. Even in less industrialized contexts, similar dental and skeletal alterations were present. The explanation could therefore involve multiple factors: smoke from production activities, diet, family habits and a climate which, in certain periods, made exposure to sunlight even more difficult.
The study concerns a limited sample and does not allow us to establish how much each factor contributed to the shortcomings observed. However, it offers a different perspective on the lives of children two centuries ago, who grew up during an industrial transformation that coincided with a long phase of climatic instability.
We don’t know the story of the woman buried in Coach Lane. We don’t know what he ate, how he spent his days or how cold he suffered. We know that from the first year of life until he was eighteen, something repeatedly interfered with the mineralization of his teeth. Eighteen episodes that no one had reason to note in the records of the time. They remained there, in the dentine, for over two hundred years.
