Abstract or Keywords
Dental wear refers to the loss of dental tissues by any combination of attrition, abrasion, and corrosion. This chapter concerns the definition and identification of these different forms and their assessment. Dental wear analysis may be qualitative, through the use of ordinal wear scales, or quantitative, either through the measurement of crown height reduction or by calculating the proportion of dentine exposure. Although such data are frequently used for the analysis of subsistence patterns or age estimation, dental wear also raises methodological issues concerning other dental analyses. Potential effects on morphological, or nonmetric, dental trait frequencies are described and subsequently demonstrated in the analysis of four traits. Two traits exhibit statistically significant wear‐related biases in trait frequency or grade distribution, and a non‐significant frequency trend is identified in a third. This analysis demonstrates the need for additional attention to wear biases on dental trait frequency.