Sickness, Hunger, War, and Religion

As open access available:
“Sickness, Hunger, War, and Religion: Multidisciplinary Perspectives.”
Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 2012, Issue 3
Edited by Michaela Harbeck, Kristin von Heyking, and Heiner Schwarzberg

A peste, fame et bello libera nos, Domine!” Disease, hunger, war, and religion have shaped human existence over many centuries. This volume presents exciting syntheses between research in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and history; moving from prehistory to the medieval period, six chapters look at humanity’s struggles with subsistence, religious belief, ill-health, death, and warfare in a variety of global landscapes, and show how, by sharing expertise and combining methodological approaches, we can advance our understanding of our common past.


http://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/publications/perspectives_mainpage/2012_perspectives/index.html

available as  pdf (pdf, 7.5 MB) (or printer-friendly version, pdf, 6.6 MB)

Rainer Schreg

archaeologist professor in medieval and postmedieval archaeology at Bamberg university

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Human skeletal health before and after the Black Death

Ongoing analysis of the human skeletal remains from London by Sharon DeWitte reveals changes in health and lifespan in the wake of the Black Death, and adds to the growing body of bioarchaeological evidence that life for survivors was better.

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/decoding-black-death.html

Rainer Schreg

archaeologist professor in medieval and postmedieval archaeology at Bamberg university

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Yersinia pestis – the missing ecological and historical dimension

Reposted from http://archaeologik.blogspot.de/2011/11/yersinia-pestis-missing-ecological-and.html

Yersinia pestis, Direct Fluorescent Antibody Stain (DFA),
200x Magnification
(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention‘s
Public Health Image Library [PHIL],
identification number #1918 [public domain]).
In a recent article a group of German and Canadian researchers presented the genome of Yersinia pestis as it has been extracted from burials of the London East Smithfield burial ground dated to 1348/49 (Bos et al. 2011). This site has been excavated by the Museum of London after it has been localised in 1986 (Grainger et al. 2008).
The article aims at the reconstruction of the ancient genome of Yersinia pestis, as this promises implications for the understanding of infectious diseases, as “genomic data from ancient microbes may help to elucidate mechanisms of pathogen evolution and adaptation for emerging and re-emerging infections”.
The authors conclude:
1.) “Genetic architecture and phylogenetic analysis indicate that the ancient organism is ancestral to most extant strains and sits very close to the ancestral node of all Y. pestis commonly associated with human infection. Temporal estimates suggest that the Black Death of 1347–1351 was the main historical event responsible for the introduction and widespread dissemination of the ancestor to all currently circulating Y. pestis strains pathogenic to humans.” The classic Black Death was quite different from previous epidemics. The authors refer to the Justinian plague “popularly assumed to have resulted from the same pathogen: our temporal estimates imply that the pandemic was either caused by a Y. pestis variant that is distinct from all currently circulating strains commonly associated with human infections, or it was another disease altogether.”
2.) “Comparisons against modern genomes reveal no unique derived positions in the medieval organism, indicating that the perceived increased virulence of the disease during the Black Death may not have been due to bacterial phenotype. These findings support the notion that factors other than microbial genetics, such as environment, vector dynamics and host susceptibility, should be at the forefront of epidemiological discussions regarding emerging Y. pestis infections.”

Rainer Schreg

archaeologist professor in medieval and postmedieval archaeology at Bamberg university

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Useful cattle murrain papers

These are two very useful papers that deal with the impact of the early 14th century cattle plagues on English manors:

Newfield, T. 2009. A cattle panzootic in early fourteenth-century Europe. Agricultural History Review 57, 155-190.

Slavin, P. in press. The great bovine pestilence and its economic and environmental consequences in England and Wales, 1318-1350. Economic History Review DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2011.00625.x

 

Rainer Schreg

archaeologist professor in medieval and postmedieval archaeology at Bamberg university

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Interdisciplinary approaches to the 14th century crisis and the history of plague

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