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5 The Archaeology of “Plague”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2012

Daniel Antoine
Daniel Antoine
Affiliation:
Daniel Antoine, BSc, MSc, PhD, Institute of Archaeology, University College London31–34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PY, UK
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Information
Medical History , Volume 52 , Supplement S27: Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague , 2008 , pp. 101 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2008. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 Daniel Antoine and Simon Hillson, ‘Famine, Black Death and health in fourteenth-century London’, Archaeol. Int., 2004/2005, 8: 26–8.

2 Philip Ziegler, The Black Death, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970, pp. 123–4, 161; Duncan Hawkins, ‘The Black Death and the new London cemeteries of 1348’, Antiquity, 1990, 64 (244): 637–42.

3 Rosemary Horrox (trans. and ed.), The Black Death, Manchester University Press, 1994, pp. 64–5; see also Antoine and Hillson, op. cit., note 1 above, p. 26.

4 Antoine and Hillson, op. cit., note 1 above, pp. 26–8.

5 Ziegler, op. cit., note 2 above, p. 162; Hawkins, op. cit., note 2 above, pp. 637–8.

6 Antoine and Hillson, op. cit., note 1 above, p. 26.

7 Ziegler, op. cit., note 2 above, p. 162; Hawkins, op. cit., note 2 above, pp. 637–8; Antoine and Hillson, op. cit., note 1 above, pp. 26–8.

8 Antoine and Hillson, op. cit., note 1 above, p. 26.

9 Stephen Porter, ‘An historical whodunit’, Biologist, 2004, 51 (2): 109–13.

10 Graham Twigg, The Black Death: a biological reappraisal, London, Batsford, 1984; Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, Biology of plagues: evidence from historical populations, Cambridge University Press, 2001; Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, Return of the Black Death: the world’s greatest serial killer, Chichester, Wiley, 2004; Samuel K Cohn Jr, The Black Death transformed: disease and culture in early Renaissance Europe, London, Arnold, 2002.

11 Cohn, op. cit., note 10 above, pp. 26–8, 100–1, 111–13.

12 Porter, op. cit., note 9 above, pp. 109–13; see also Antoine and Hillson, op. cit., note 1 above, p. 26.

13 Gunnar Karlsson, ‘Plague without rats: the case of fifteenth-century Iceland’, J. Mediev. Hist., 1996, 22 (3): 263–84.

14 David Herlihy, The Black Death and the transformation of the west, ed. Samuel K Cohn, London, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 26; Antoine and Hillson, op. cit., note 1 above, pp. 26–7.

15 Karlsson, op. cit., note 13 above, p. 265.

16 Scott and Duncan, Return of the Black Death, op. cit., note 10 above, p. 225.

17 Michael McCormick, ‘Rats, communications, and plague: toward an ecological history’, J. Interdiscip. Hist., 2003, 34: 1–25.

18 Simon Hillson, Teeth, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

19 Andrew B Appleby, ‘The disappearance of plague: a continuing puzzle’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 1980, 33 (2): 161–73; Paul Slack, ‘The disappearance of the plague: an alternative view’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 1981, 34 (3): 469–76.

20 H R Hunt, S Rosen, and C A Hoppert, ‘Morphology of molar teeth and occlusion in young rats’, J. Dent. Res., 1970, 49: 508–14; M J Lawrence and R W Brown, Mammals of Britain: their tracks, trails and signs, London, Blandford Press, 1973, pp. 194–9.

21 Anton Ervynck, ‘Sedentism or urbanism? On the origin of the commensal black rat (Rattus rattus)’, in Keith Dobney and Terry O’Connor (eds), Bones and the man: studies in honour of Don Brothwell, Oxford, Oxbow Books, 2002, pp. 95–109, on p. 95.

22 Several examples of fleas from the archaeological record are discussed in Paul C Buckland and Jon P Sadler, ‘A biogeography of the human flea, Pulex irritans L. (Siphonaptera: Pulicidae)’, Journal of Biogeography, 1989, 16 (2): 115–120.

23 Marcello A Mannino, Baruch F Spiro, and Kenneth D Thomas, ‘Sampling shells for seasonality: oxygen isotope analysis on shell carbonates of the inter-tidal gastropod Monodonta lineata (da Costa) from populations across its modern range and from a Mesolithic site in southern Britain’, J. Archaeol. Sci., 2003, 30(6): 667–79.

24 Charlotte Roberts and Margaret Cox, Health and disease in Britain: from prehistory to the present day, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2003, p. 227.

25 R S Bradley, K R Briffa, J E Cole, M K Hughes, and T J Osborn, ‘The climate of the last millennium’, in Keith D Alverson, Raymond S Bradley, and Thomas F Pedersen (eds), Paleoclimate, global change and the future, Berlin and New York, Springer, 2003, pp. 105–41.

26 John Schofield, Medieval London houses, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995.

27 Roberts and Cox, op. cit., note 24 above, pp. 287, 290–3.

28 Ibid., pp. 337–8; Hugh Clout (ed.), The Times history of London, London, Times Books, HarperCollins, 2004, pp. 10–11, 88–89, 96–97.

29 M Samuel and Gustav Milne, ‘The “Ledene Hall” and medieval market’, in Gustav Milne (ed.), From Roman basilica to medieval market: archaeology in action in the City of London’, London, HMSO, 1992, pp. 39–50; Clout (ed.), op. cit., note 28 above, pp. 82, 88–91; Roberts and Cox, op. cit., note 24 above, pp. 368–9.

30 T Waldron, Counting the dead: the epidemiology of skeletal populations, Chichester, Wiley, 1994, pp. 10–27; see also T Waldron, Shadows in the soil: human bones and archaeology, Stroud, Tempus, 2001, pp. 44–48.

31 S P Nawrocki, ‘Taphonomic processes in historic cemeteries’, in Anne L Grauer (ed.), Bodies of evidence: reconstructing history through skeletal analysis, New York, Wiley-Liss, 1995, pp. 49–66.

32 Waldron, Shadows in the soil, op. cit., note 30 above, pp. 41–53.

33 Ibid.

34 Charlotte Roberts and Anne Grauer, ‘Commentary: Bones, bodies and representivity in the archaeological record’, Int. J. Epidemiol., 2001, 30 (1): 109–10.

35 Manolis J Papagrigorakis, Christos Yapijakis, Philippos N Synodinos, and Effie Baziotopoulou-Valavani, ‘DNA examination of ancient dental pulp incriminates typhoid fever as a probable cause of the plague of Athens’, Int. J. Infect. Dis., 2006, 10 (3): 206–14.

36 Ibid.

37 Roberts and Grauer, op. cit., note 34 above.

38 Jane E Buikstra and Douglas H Ubelaker, Standards for data collection from human skeletal remains, Arkansas Archeological Survey Research Series No. 44, Fayetteville, AR, Arkansas Archaeological Survey, 1994.

39 Theya Molleson and Margaret Cox, The Spitalfields project. Volume 2: the anthropology: the middling sort, Research Report 86, York, Council for British Archaeology, 1993, pp. 145–155, 167–179; Roberts and Grauer, op. cit., note 34 above.

40 H A Waldron, ‘Are plague pits of particular use to palaeoepidemiologists?’, Int. J. Epidemiol., 2001, 30 (1): 104–8; Beverley J Margerison and Christopher J Knüsel, ‘Paleodemographic comparison of a catastrophic and an attritional death assemblage’, Am. J. Physical Anthropol., 2002, 119 (2): 134–43.

41 Arthur C Aufderheide and Conrado Rodríguez-Martín, The Cambridge encyclopedia of human paleopathology, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 195–198; Roberts and Grauer, op. cit., note 34 above.

42 Aufderheide and Rodríguez-Martín, op. cit., note 41 above, p. 198.

43 See publication for full guidelines: A Cooper and H N Poinar, ‘Ancient DNA: do it right or not at all’, Science, 2000, 289: 1139.

44 Didier Raoult, Gérard Aboudharam, Eric Crubézy, Georges Larrouy, Bertrand Ludes, and Michel Drancourt, ‘Molecular identification by “suicide PCR” of Yersinia pestis as the agent of medieval Black Death’, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2000, 97: 12800–803.

45 James Wood and Sharon DeWitte-Aviña, ‘Was the Black Death yersinial plague?’, Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2003, 3 (6): 327–8; Michael B Prentice, Tom Gilbert and Alan Cooper, ‘Was the Black Death caused by Yersinia pestis?’, Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2004, 4 (2): 72.

46 M Thomas P Gilbert, Jon Cuccui, William White, Niels Lynnerup, Richard W Titball, Alan Cooper, and Michael B Prentice, ‘Absence of Yersinia pestis-specific DNA in human teeth from five European excavations of putative plague victims’, Microbiology, 2004, 150; 341–54.

47 Michel Drancourt and Didier Raoult, ‘Molecular detection of Yersinia pestis in dental pulp’, Microbiology, 2004, 150: 263–4; M Thomas P Gilbert, Jon Cuccui, William White, Niels Lynnerup, Richard W Titball, Alan Cooper and Michael B Prentice, ‘Response to Drancourt and Raoult’, Microbiology, 2004, 150: 264–5.

48 Ingrid Wiechmann and Gisela Grupe, ‘Detection of Yersinia pestis DNA in two early medieval skeletal finds from Aschheim (Upper Bavaria, 6th century A.D.)’, Am. J. Physical Anthropol., 2005, 126: 48–55.

49 Michel Drancourt and Didier Raoult, ‘Paleomicrobiology: current issues and perspectives’, Nat. Rev. Microbiol., 2005, 3: 23–35.

50 Michel Drancourt, Véronique Roux, La Vu Dang, Lam Tran-Hung, Dominique Castex, Viviane Chenal-Francisque, Hiroyaki Ogata, Pierre-Edouard Fournier, Eric Crubézy, Didier Raoult, ‘Genotyping, Orientalis-like Yersinia pestis, and plague pandemics’, Emerg. Infect. Dis., 2004, 10 (9): 1585–92; Michel Drancourt, Michel Signoli, La Vu Dang, Bruno Bizot, Véronique Roux, Stéfan Tzortzis, Didier Raoult, ‘Yersinia pestis Orientalis in remains of ancient plague patients’, Emerg. Infect. Dis., 2007, 13: Available from http://www.cdc.gov/EID/content/13/2/332.htm; see criticism by Gilles Vergnaud, ‘Yersinia pestis genotyping’ [letter], Emerg. Infect. Dis., Aug. 2005, 11 (8); available from http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol11no08/04-0942_05-0568.htm.

51 Michel Drancourt, Linda Houhamdi, and Didier Raoult, ‘Yersinia pestis as a telluric, human ectoparasite-borne organism’, Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2006, 6 (4): 234–41.

52 Papagrigorakis, et al., op. cit., note 35 above.

53 Daniel Antoine, comment on ‘Typhoid caused fall of Athens’, BBC News, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4639840.stm.

54 Papagrigorakis, et al., op. cit., note 35 above, p. 212; Cooper and Poinar, op. cit., note 43 above.

55 Beth Shapiro, Andrew Rambaut and M Thomas P Gilbert, ‘No proof that typhoid caused the plague of Athens (a reply to Papagrigorakis et al.)’, Int. J. Infect. Dis., 2006, 10 (4): 334–5.

56 Manolis J Papagrigorakis, Christos Yapijakis, Philippos N Synodinos, and Effie Baziotopoulou-Valavani, ‘Insufficient phylogenetic analysis may not exclude candidacy of typhoid fever as a probable cause of the plague of Athens’, Int. J. Infect. Dis., 2006, 10 (4): 335–6; see also Michael P Cummings and Axel Meyer, ‘Magic bullets and golden rules: data sampling in molecular phylogenetics’, Zoology, 2005, 108 (4): 329–36.

57 Antoine and Hillson, op. cit., note 1 above, p. 27.

58 Derek Keene, personal communication; Bruce M S Campbell, James A Galloway, Derek Keene, and M Murphy, A medieval capital and its grain supply: agrarian production and distribution in the London region c. 1300, Historical Geography Research Series No. 30, London, Institute of British Geographers, 1993.

59 Antoine and Hillson, op. cit., note 1 above, p. 27.

60 William C Jordan, The great famine: northern Europe in the early fourteenth century, Princeton University Press, 1996.

61 Antoine and Hillson, op. cit note 1 above, p. 27.

62 Ibid., pp. 26–28; Daniel Antoine, Simon Hillson, Derek Keene, M Christopher Dean and Gustav Milne, forthcoming.

63 Timothy J Welch, W Florian Fricke, Patrick F McDermott, David G White, Marie-Laure Rosso, et al., ‘Multiple antimicrobial resistance in plague: an emerging public health risk’, PLoS ONE, 2007, 2 (3): e309.