Introduction

In 1991, Albert A. Dahlberg wrote “Historical perspective of dental anthropology” for the volume Advances in Dental Anthropology (Kelley and Larsen, 1991). A few years later, the senior author (Scott, 1997) wrote an historical paper on “Dental anthropology” for Frank Spencer's 1997 edited volume on the History of Physical Anthropology. Dahlberg was both a dentist and a pioneer in the field of dental anthropology. Because of those two abiding interests, his historical treatment focused as much on developments in oral biology as on the history of dental anthropology per se. Scott, a physical anthropologist, dealt with the early history of dental research, but the overall focus of his article revolved around the manner in which teeth have been used in anthropological research. Given the recency of these two articles, we do not want to simply reiterate points already made. Moreover, in no way is this general contribution comparable to articles on the history of dental anthropology in circumscribed geographic areas, such as those written for Australia (Brown, 1992, 1998) and Hungary (Kósa, 1993). We applaud these efforts and encourage other workers to document the history of the field in their country or region.

Our goal is to focus broadly on the growth of dental anthropology during the twentieth century and comment on potential directions in the twenty-first century.