The archaeology of "plague"

Abstract

in East Smithfield. It was excavated by archaeologists from the Museum of London and, as shown in Figure 1, it contained two mass burial trenches and a mass burial pit, densely filled with several hundred articulated skeletons, as well as many individual graves.4 Written evidence confirms that, with West Smithfield, the East Smithfield Royal Mint cemetery was one of two emergency burial grounds created to cope with the Black Death epidemic.5 It is currently the largest and most comprehensively excavated Black Death cemetery in England, and the majority of an estimated 2400 people buried there are believed to have died from the Black Death, of which over 600 were recovered by the Museum of London.6 Opened in late 1348 or early 1349 by Ralph Stratford, the Bishop of London, it provides researchers and archaeologists with a unique assemblage of people who died at the peak of the Black Death epidemic in London.7 The cause of the epidemic has recently come under scrutiny and the established view that the Black Death was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis has been challenged. Plague and Yersinia pestis From the Latin ‘‘plaga’’, meaning ‘‘blow’’, the word ‘‘plague’’ can be used in its broad sense to describe any large-scale calamity, such as an insect infestation or an epidemic disease with a high mortality rate. It is also often employed to describe a specific disease, the acute epidemic disease of rats and other wild rodents caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. In modern epidemics, the bacterium is usually transmitted to man by fleas—in particular by the rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis—resulting in the most common clinical form of the disease: bubonic plague. Although an uncommon occurrence in modern outbreaks, the bacterium Yersinia pestis can also enter the blood-stream (septicaemic plague) or the lungs (pneumonic plague), leading to highly fatal forms of the disease. Patients with bubonic plague are likely to suffer from high fever, delirium, aching limbs and painful swelling of the lymph nodes called buboes. In some patients, the buboes burst after a few days, releasing pus and then healing. In others, subcutaneous bleeding may occur, producing black patches that may lead to fatal ulcers. Until recently, it was widely believed that bubonic plague was behind the 1347–49 epidemic, and the presence of black subcutaneous lesions on some of the plague victims may have explained the origin of the term ‘‘Black Death’’.8 However, some researchers have highlighted interesting differences between the epidemic of 1347–49 and more recent outbreaks of bubonic plague, raising the possibility that the bacterium Yersinia pestis was not behind the Black Death epidemic. A good review