Tooth Cementum Annulation: A Literature Review

Abstract

Tooth Cementum Annulation (or TCA) is a technique that relies on the analysis of the incremental growth of dental cementum for age and season at death estimation. It has been extensively adopted as a “black box technique”, despite numerous controversies. Its potential in forensics called for this review, which aims to provide the reader with an overarching critical synthesis of what has been done and what is known about the TCA from different perspectives. Results have been divided according to three different themes: human, animal and evolutionary studies, as well as biological studies. The summary and comparison of these show the complexity of this topic, its limits, and how the scientific community can collectively collaborate for improvements. Overall, it is clear that the potential of the TCA is significant in terms of age and season at death estimation and that (as long as its biology is still addressed and researched for) there should not be any reason to not consider this technique as valid as the other anthropological methods adopted for biological profiling.