Children in 18th and 19th century England got sick with rickets at high rates, and most explanations point to factory smoke, crowded cities, and poverty. A new study in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology adds another factor that scholars rarely weigh: the climate itself.
Multiple scattered bands of dark scalloped defects down the length of the tooth are visible. They indicat voids where tissue formed poorly due to vitamin D deficiency. Credit: Kendall et al., Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology (2026)
Researchers from Durham University looked at Coach Lane, a Quaker cemetery in North Shields in north-east England. People were buried there between 1711 and 1829, while the town changed from a fishing village into an industrial port. A dig in 2010 recovered 236 burials. The team studied 30 teeth from 21 people whose names are unknown.
Teeth keep a record of childhood. Dentin, the inner layer, hardens on a fixed schedule as a child grows. When it fails to harden fully, it leaves flawed patches. A few flaws are normal. Flaws that repeat at regular intervals with healthy dentin between them point to vitamin D deficiency. The Coach Lane teeth showed many such flaws, and some people had bands that repeated each year, which suggests a seasonal pattern. The gaps appeared from infancy into early adulthood, though mostly in early childhood.
The teeth alone gave ages, not calendar years. So the team turned to the cemetery’s burial register. Quakers kept careful records, and the register lists ages and years of death for many of the 197 people named in it. Subtracting age from death year gave estimated birth years for 109 of them. The graves had no markers, so the researchers couldn’t match a register entry to a specific skeleton. They treated the cemetery as one community instead.
The image shows multiple scattered bands of dark scalloped defects down the length of the tooth, which indicate voids where tissue formed poorly due to vitamin D deficiency. Credit: Kendall et al., Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology (2026)
The birth dates lined up with cold, dim periods. Of the 109 people, 91 were born within 10 years after a major volcanic eruption, and 41 were born when weak solar output and volcanic activity overlapped. This all happened during the Little Ice Age, a long cooling stretch between the 13th and 19th centuries driven by erupting volcanoes and a quiet sun. Less sunlight meant less UV light, and skin needs UV light to make vitamin D.
The team also compared Coach Lane with other European sites, some industrial and some not. Rates of mineral flaws in teeth and bones didn’t track neatly with industrialization, latitude, city size, or social class. Sites with many burials from before 1800 tended to show more flaws, though. That pattern fits a role for the colder climate, since it started before the factories did.
The authors don’t claim climate beats pollution or poverty. They argue vitamin D deficiency came from several causes working together, and the mix changed with time and place. Their advice to bioarchaeologists is to treat climate records as part of the basic background when reading skeletons for signs of disease.
The study has limits. Without grave markers, the team couldn’t tie a person’s tooth record to a birth year, so it couldn’t test whether multi-year runs of flaws match the worst years of the cooling. The sample is small too. Cutting teeth open to study dentin destroys them, and the work costs a lot and needs special equipment. Scans that leave teeth intact and chemical tests may soon allow larger studies. Future work should use samples with known dates and life stories, and should look at other signs of poor health such as stunted growth in children.
Lead author Ellen Kendall says climate instability feels like a modern problem, but people have faced it before, and learning how they coped can help us prepare.
Publication: Kendall, E. J., Sohler-Snoddy, A. M., Kendall, R., Koon, H., Gowland, R., Weale, M. C., … Edwards, S. (2026). “The bright sun was extinguish’d”: metabolic health and vitamin D status in a Little Ice Age population (18th–19th c.) in North East England. Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, 5(1909791). doi:10.3389/fearc.2026.1909791