The teeth of people buried more than a thousand years ago in England's Peak District have told archaeologists a story of poisoned childhoods, dangerous work and a medieval industry whose toxic legacy reached levels not seen again until the Industrial Revolution.
A study published in the journal Antiquity analysed chemical signatures preserved in tooth enamel from burials in three Peak District cemeteries, with skeletons ranging from about 650 to 1500 CE. The results trace the rise of Derbyshire's lead-mining industry across eight centuries — and reveal that the children who grew up beside its furnaces were breathing and swallowing lead at industrial-era concentrations. Smithsonian Magazine and Archaeology Magazine have also covered the findings this week.
"What we were measuring was the lead concentrations incorporated into the teeth when the individuals were children," Christopher Loveluck, the University of Nottingham archaeologist who led the study, told the BBC. "And it showed the levels were off the scale."
A chemical diary written in childhood
Tooth enamel is laid down in early childhood — roughly between the ages of four and twelve — and, unlike bone, it does not remodel during a person's lifetime. That makes it a sealed archive: whatever lead the body absorbed from dust, fumes and contaminated food and water during those years stays locked in the enamel forever.
The researchers sampled 17 people, most from two Castleton cemeteries — Joule Yard, used between the 7th and 11th centuries, and Spital Field, used between the 12th and 15th — alongside five individuals from a 7th-century cemetery at Wigber Low and two from the Iron Age site of Eldon Hole. By measuring the lead trapped in their enamel, the team reconstructed childhood exposure to pollution between around the year 650 and 1500.
Comparing those readings with British populations stretching from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution, they found something startling. By the 7th century, children living in Derbyshire mining communities already had lead levels the same as, if not higher than, those of children who lived in industrialised cities some 1,000 years later. By the mid-8th century, large-scale production had contaminated the wider environment around Castleton.
Pinpointing an industry's rebirth
Lead mining in the Peak District dates back to Roman times, but production collapsed along with the empire's presence in Britain in the 5th century. Historians have long been unsure exactly when the regional industry was revived — partly because centuries of mining and smelting erased the evidence, with Roman and medieval lead waste repeatedly melted down again between the 16th and 19th centuries.
The teeth provided the answer the slag heaps could not. The study pinpoints the revitalisation of lead production to the mid-7th century — the first solid evidence of when post-Roman lead production was established in Derbyshire. That restart seeded what would become western Europe's largest lead-producing region between the late 12th and 16th centuries.
Pollution reached its maximum in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, when lead production in the Peak District was at its height — a finding that lines up with previous historical and environmental evidence. At its worst, the researchers say, lead pollution in these communities may at times have surpassed even Industrial Revolution-era levels.
Rich and poor breathed different air
Perhaps the most striking finding is how uneven the poison was spread. The researchers linked their chemical readings to what was found in the graves. People buried with high-status grave goods — weapons and other valuable items — had much lower lead concentrations than those interred in poorer burials.
That suggests the elite could afford to keep their distance from the worst of the contamination: while the upper classes owned lead-imbued objects, they were of higher quality and their owners were less exposed to the furnaces' fumes — a divide also explored by Popular Science and Earth.com's science coverage. Meanwhile, working families employed in the mines and smelters routinely raised their children in far larger clouds of lead dust.
An early-medieval Anglo-Saxon mount of the kind found as grave goods in high-status burials, which showed lower lead exposure.
Credit: Portable Antiquities Scheme, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Women bore the heaviest burden
Women appear to have borne a particularly heavy burden. Three women who died between the ages of 17 and 25 showed especially high quantities of lead in their tooth enamel. Overall, the pattern is bleak: most of the men in the sample survived to middle or old age, while women often died during young adulthood.
"Our results indicate that in these mining communities, girls and boys alike were raised in dangerously polluted home environments," said co-author Anna Bloxam, co-director of the Castleton excavations. She added that the exposure would likely have harmed health and may have contributed to higher rates of premature death among women of child-bearing age.
Lead is toxic to the nervous, renal and reproductive systems, and the researchers believe the pollution they measured was not an abstract environmental reading but a force that shortened lives — particularly those of women in their child-bearing years.
Bones that remember industry
The team behind the work is delighted to have settled a long-running historical question with evidence supplied, as Loveluck put it, by the people themselves. The study provides the first definitive date for the establishment of the early medieval lead industry in the Peak District — mid-7th century AD — and shows how an industry that made the region rich also made its poorest residents sick.
It is a reminder that pollution is not a modern invention. A thousand years before the factory chimney, the furnaces of Derbyshire were already writing their output into the bodies of children.
More science stories are on Verity, from the return of the bluefin tuna to this year's Nobel chemistry prize. Read the latest headlines or find out more about us on the about page.
