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Ancient DNA from Yersinia pestis has been identified in skeletons at four urban burial grounds in Cambridge, England, and at a nearby rural cemetery. Dating to between ad 1349 and 1561, these represent individuals who died of plague during the second pandemic. Most come from normative individual burials, rather than mass graves. This pattern represents a major advance in archaeological knowledge, shifting focus away from a few exceptional discoveries of mass burials to what was normal practice in most medieval contexts. Detailed consideration of context allows the authors to identify a range of burial responses to the second pandemic within a single town and its hinterland. This permits the creation of a richer and more varied narrative than has previously been possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern plague outbreaks exhibit a distinct seasonal pattern. By contrast, the seasonality of historical outbreaks and its drivers has not been studied systematically. Here, we investigate the seasonal pattern, the epidemic peak timing and growth rates, and the association with latitude, temperature, and precipitation using a large, novel dataset of plague- and all-cause mortality during the Second Pandemic in Europe and the Mediterranean. We show that epidemic peak timing followed a latitudinal gradient, with mean annual temperature negatively associated with peak timing. Based on modern temperature data, the predicted epidemic growth of all outbreaks was positive between 11.7°C and 21.5°C with a maximum around 17.3°C. Hence, our study provides evidence that the growth of plague epidemics across the whole study region depended on similar absolute temperature thresholds. Here, we present a systematic analysis of the seasonality of historical plague in the Northern Hemisphere, and we show consistent evidence for a temperature-related process influencing the epidemic peak timing and growth rates of plague epidemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the monographic work of T.F. Khaidarov, devoted to the study of the second plague pandemic in the Golden Horde and neighboring territories, which was published in 2018. Researchers have already studied some aspects of the course of the Black Death in Eastern Europe. Before the publication of the monograph, T.F. Khaidarov had published several articles devoted to this problem. Despite this, the monograph is the first experience of a comprehensive study of the manifestations of the second plague pandemic in all their diversity in Eastern Europe. The objectives set in the book required the synthesis of various natural sciences (biology, climatology, medicine) and social (history, historical source study, social anthropology) disciplines. In the monograph phenomena of different scale are investigated. On the one hand, the epidemics in Eastern Europe were considered in the context of the worldwide course of the pandemic. On the other hand, from the researcher’s view did not escape the local phenomena: the specific dating of a particular outbreak of the epidemic, the problem of the perception of the disease by society, the features of its description, etc. In the review, an assessment is given to this "total" study of the pandemic. The advantage of this approach is that it overcomes the boundaries between different scientific disciplines, allows us to fill the knowledge that is fragmentary in each separate science. The drawback of this approach is that it leads to the absolutization of the plague factor in history. The study of Black Death becomes the main link in the whole multidisciplinary research, turns into a kind of paradigm. Sometimes this leads to incorrect reading of historical sources and scientific works. Despite the revealed shortcomings, it should be recognized that the monograph of T.F. Khaidarov is a serious step forward in the study of the problem at the present stage of the development of science.

• Two waves of population loss are identified contemporary with Black Death pandemic. • Transformations occurred in politics, religion, identities, economy, and environment. • New commercial goods and material culture suggest arrival of Mande diaspora. • Merchant diasporas expanded in cooperation with local communities after pandemic. Merchant diasporas have significantly influenced local and interregional processes in world history, but archaeology is only starting to understand the diversity of political, economic, social and religious contexts within which they developed. Recent research has suggested that the second plague pandemic (Black Death) likely affected West Africa. However, little is known regarding the diversity of local and regional impacts and responses. We argue that documented population losses likely caused by plague resulted in disruptions to commercial networks and stimulated merchant diasporas from neighboring Mali into Burkina Faso and further south. Drawing on an expanded corpus of data and new stratigraphic and Bayesian analyses of AMS dates from the site of Kirikongo (western Burkina Faso), this paper identifies two waves of likely plague-related depopulation in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries AD and explores the resulting social, economic, religious and environmental transformations. Notably, local communities worked cooperatively with recently arrived Mande merchant diasporas from the Empire of Mali to reconstruct regional economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores how the prevalence of tuberculosis (TB) in a medieval hospital was affected by the demographic and social changes that following the Black Death (1346–1353 CE), the initial years of the Second Plague Pandemic. To do this, skeletal remains of individuals buried at the Hospital of St John the Evangelist in Cambridge, England, that could be dated to living before (n = 77) or after (n = 55) the Black Death were assessed for evidence of TB (indicated by destructive lesions of the spine, ribs, large joints, and other recognised criteria). Overall, the odds of females having skeletal lesions caused by TB were over four times higher than males. No significant difference was detected in the prevalence rates in those who lived before and after the Black Death (7.8%, 6/77 before and 11.0%, 6/55 after). However, the odds of females having skeletal evidence of TB were over five times greater after the Black Death than they were before. These findings indicate that women may have been 1) more susceptible to TB, 2) surviving longer post-infection than men, and/or 3) that women with TB were more likely to be admitted to the Hospital especially following the Black Death. It is also possible that impairment due to TB infection may have been a contributing factor for entry into the Hospital for women but not men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Did the Black Death, the famous, devastating plague pandemic that struck the Mediterranean and Western Europe in the mid-14th century and seeded new strains of the pathogen, Yersinia pestis, in new locales, also reach Sub-Saharan Africa? That it reached the Islamic North African littoral has never been in question: there is ample testimony from Arabic documentary sources for its devastating effects from Egypt to the Maghreb. But did it stop there? Archaeologists now have reason to believe that there was widespread abandonment of urban communities in West Africa in the 14th or 15th centuries. Focusing on the other side of the continent, the present essay argues that previously unutilized evidence—a “living archive” of genetic data combined with a new reading of linguistic and documentary evidence from the 14th through 20th centuries—suggests that plague did have a significant impact on pre-modern East Africa. The strains of Y. pestis currently found in East and Central Africa derive from one of the lineages involved in late medieval outbreaks in Central Eurasia. This post-Black Death strain, it is argued here, entered the continent most likely in the late 15th or early 16th century. This coincides with hitherto unexplained population migrations and other cultural signs of reactions to a deadly emerging disease. Although no aDNA (historical genetic material) for Y. pestis has yet been recovered from late medieval or early modern Africa, the present essay suggests that evidence for Y. pestis’s evolution and transcontinental movements, even those outside of Africa, can help archaeologists and historians draw Africa more centrally into the narratives of global history.

Many archaeological sites in the central West African savanna were either abandoned or reduced in size between the 14th and 15th centuries CE. Explanations have tended to invoke the effects of climate change (increasing aridity), political transformations, and religious conversion. However, more recently scholars have increasingly suggested that this regional pattern could be in part the result of plague epidemics. In this paper we explore the methodological challenges inherent in linking abandonments with the effects of epidemics in the archaeological record through a contextualized examination of settlement pattern data from recent archaeological research at sites in Burkina Faso and Mali. While plague cannot be definitively identified based on settlement pattern data alone, current evidence supports the possibility that plague affected populations in this area of West Africa. A broader view of sites throughout West Africa indicates that the possible effects of plague were widespread.

The Black Death (1346-1353 CE) was the initial wave of the so-called Second Plague Pandemic, which lasted until the 19th century and is known to have affected Europe, Asia and Africa. While the pandemic has been characterized as one of the largest infectious disease catastrophes of the pre-modern era, its origins remain unclear and have been a topic of continuous debate. At present, such discussions are not only limited to the pandemic's geographic source, including the proposed regions of western, central and eastern Asia, but also include different views on its temporal framing. Moreover, ancient DNA research has to date maintained a somewhat narrow geographical focus on the Second Plague Pandemic. Ancient Yersinia pestis genomes have been exclusively retrieved from epidemic sites from the 14th to 18th centuries in western Eurasia. While these data have provided valuable insights regarding extinct Y. pestis diversity and the pandemic's progression within Europe, they have provided little information on its primary source. Here, we present newly generated ancient Y. pestis genomic data from archaeological sites in present-day Kyrgyzstan, central Eurasia. Such sites have been shown to contain epidemic victims from the 14th century, precisely dated based on tombstone inscriptions. Our synthesis of archaeological, historical and ancient genomic data shows a clear association of the identified strains with the pandemic's geographic and temporal source. These data provide a precise framework towards characterizing the early dispersal history of the Second Plague Pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]