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Research Reveals More Complete Picture of the Devastation Wrought by the Black Death
May 25, 2016
By examining pottery remains in over 50 rural settlements, archaeologists now better understand the extent that the population was wiped out by the plague
The Black Death, an outbreak of bubonic plague that devastated Europe and Asia between 1346 and 1353, is considered one of the greatest cataclysms of all time. The disease, caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis and transmitted by fleas, wiped out half the population according to contemporary accounts. The famous Italian poet Francesco Petrarch told a friend that he did not think people in the future would even believe their suffering. ‘O happy posterity,” he wrote after watching half the city of Florence die, “who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.’
As it turns out, Petrarch was partially right. No one disputes that the Black Death happened or that it was a society-reordering disaster. But, as Sarah Kaplan reports in The Washington Post, researchers haven’t had much to go on to confirm the claims that a quarter to half of Europe’s population perished because of the plague. Compared to modern plagues, like the Spanish flu in the early 20th century, which killed about 3 percent of the world’s population, the number killed by the Black Death seemed high.
That’s one reason archaeologist Carenza Lewis of the University of Lincoln decided to dig a little deeper. She excavated 2,000 one-meter-square pits in 55 rural settlements occupied before and after the plague across eastern Britain, looking for the concentration of pottery shards, broken bits of everyday pottery.
“Under every village, every community, there is a huge reservoir of archaeological evidence just sitting there,” she tells Kaplan. “Evidence of these life-shattering events that people like us would have lived through — or not.”
The Black Death, an outbreak of bubonic plague that devastated Europe and Asia between 1346 and 1353, is considered one of the greatest cataclysms of all time. The disease, caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis and transmitted by fleas, wiped out half the population according to contemporary accounts. The famous Italian poet Francesco Petrarch told a friend that he did not think people in the future would even believe their suffering. ‘O happy posterity,” he wrote after watching half the city of Florence die, “who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.’
As it turns out, Petrarch was partially right. No one disputes that the Black Death happened or that it was a society-reordering disaster. But, as Sarah Kaplan reports in The Washington Post, researchers haven’t had much to go on to confirm the claims that a quarter to half of Europe’s population perished because of the plague. Compared to modern plagues, like the Spanish flu in the early 20th century, which killed about 3 percent of the world’s population, the number killed by the Black Death seemed high.
That’s one reason archaeologist Carenza Lewis of the University of Lincoln decided to dig a little deeper. She excavated 2,000 one-meter-square pits in 55 rural settlements occupied before and after the plague across eastern Britain, looking for the concentration of pottery shards, broken bits of everyday pottery.
“Under every village, every community, there is a huge reservoir of archaeological evidence just sitting there,” she tells Kaplan. “Evidence of these life-shattering events that people like us would have lived through — or not.”
Link: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/research-reveals-more-complete-picture-of-the-devastation-wrought-by-the-black-death-180959233/?no-ist
