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A pre-Justinian plague in England? Radiocarbon dates, archaeological and historical chronology

After genetic evidence was provided in Aschheim a few years ago indicating that the Justinian Plague was actually caused by the pathogen Yersinia pestis (Wiechmann / Grupe 2005), it became possible to find it in numerous locations across Austria, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Spain. This reveals a previously unknown diversity of the pathogen (Keller et al. 2019). The origin is traced to Central Asia (Damgaard et al. 2018), where genetic evidence of an ancestral form of Y. pestis, particularly in the Xinjiang region of northwest China and in Kyrgyzstan, is available (Eroshenko et al. 2017). The Justinian Plague, often called the first pandemic, is by no means the first. We rather need to expect waves of plague already in prehistory, with the pathogen likely emerging 30,000 to 50,000 years ago (Rasmussen et al. 2015). Probably the virulence of y.pestis varied during the evolution of the pathogen (Demeure et al. 2019; Bonczarowska et al. 2023). Overall, genetic studies promise an increasingly detailed picture of the evolution of plague and its individual pandemics. This applies equally to the Justinian Plague in the 6th century and the Black Death in the 14th century. There are also written reports about these two pandemics, which, however, raise some questions regarding their course and mortality rates that may be overestimated.

The “first pandemic”, which lasted from around 540 to well into the Continue reading A pre-Justinian plague in England? Radiocarbon dates, archaeological and historical chronology

Rainer Schreg

archaeologist professor in medieval and postmedieval archaeology at Bamberg university

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