Burial Archaeology and the First Plague Pandemic

Abstract

Archaeological evidence from funerary contexts is largely ignored in current scholarship on the First Plague Pandemic, despite the important information that burials and cemeteries can provide about how plague might have affected societies. Skeletal (mainly dental) remains are used in the paleogenomic search for victims of plague (Yersinia pestis), but significant contextual information is to be gained from plague-positive graves through bioarchaeological study of the complete individual and their broader funerary context, both of which are largely absent from current scholarship. We argue that future scholarship on the First Plague Pandemic must bring burial archaeology to the growing body of evidence, and archaeologists themselves must lead or be involved in this research. We present three ways in which burial archaeology can be used effectively to study the impact of first-pandemic plague on individuals and communities: by reconsidering whether we should be looking for an archaeology of “crisis” for this disease event, by evaluating burial archaeology (especially of multiple burials) in its proper sociocultural context, and by examining bioarchaeological evidence from entire cemeteries where plague genomes are recovered in any quantity. We conclude by offering an example of how such archaeological evidence can be more inclusively and effectively incorporated into interdisciplinary plague studies, to the benefit of the field.