I don't understand how the teeth filing worked without causing life-long issues leading to the tooth falling out? And that picture makes it look like the enamel re-coated the filed area, which doesn't happen.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

But in recent years, researchers have documented evidence of two other forms of Viking Age body modification: filed teeth and artificially deformed skulls.

While both forms of body modification have received significant attention in other cultural contexts, the specific social implications of these practices in Viking Age society have not been comprehensively studied.

It is this issue that researchers Matthias Toplak and Lukas Kerk—with the Viking Museum Haithabu and the University of Münster, both in Germany—wanted to explore in their latest study, published in the journal Current Swedish Archaeology.

"We decided to join forces and to conduct a case study to see if we can gain a better understanding of why these body modifications were performed and what they might have signaled in the society of Viking Age Gotland," the authors told Newsweek.

The Viking Age was a period in medieval history, between roughly the late 8th and 11th centuries, when the Vikings—a Scandinavian seafaring people—raided, colonized and traded widely across Europe and beyond.

But based on the available evidence, Toplak and Kerk assume that the custom was not part of the culture of Viking Age Gotland and instead came to this region from Southeastern Europe.

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