Crossrail archaeologists excavate an apparent mass grave at the Bedlam hospital cemetery

A mass grave of 30 possible bubonic plague victims is being excavated in London at the huge cemetery of Bedlam mental asylum that was discovered while workers were building the Crossrail subway system.
Authorities think the people buried in the mass grave may be victims of bubonic or some other plague because unlike many others buried at Bedlam Hospital cemetery, these people appear to have all been buried on the same day.
Jay Carver, the chief archaeologist with Crossrail, said: "This mass burial, so different from the other individual burials found in the Bedlam cemetery, is very likely a reaction to a catastrophic event. We hope this gruesome but exciting find will tell us more about one of London's most notorious killers."
A Crossrail news release said of the mass grave: “A headstone found nearby was marked ‘1665,’ and the fact the individuals appear to have been buried on the same day, suggest they were victims of the Great Plague. The thin wooden coffins have collapsed and rotted, giving the appearance of a slumped and distorted mass grave. The skeletons will now be analyzed by osteologists from Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), and scientific tests may reveal if bubonic plague or some other pestilence was the cause of death.”
The graveyard, which dates back to 1569 and operated until at least the late 1730s, was found in 2013 during excavations to construct the 13-mile high-speed Crossrail tunnel under Central London.

Adult skull of the Roman period, found at Liverpool Street (Crossrail photo)

Officials building the huge cross-London underground railway are publishing the identity of some of the thousands of people buried 400 to 500 years ago in Bedlam cemetery. After researching parish records, the Crossrail project has released a fascinating database online giving names, occupations and causes of death.
The database of names, identities and occupations of about 5,000 people who were buried there can be read here: http://www.crossrail.co.uk/bedlamregister. It includes details about who lived in London and what they did. The database reveals the case of a woman who died October 17, 1581:

'a poore woman, which dyed in the streat, of the plague, what she was or from where she came, we know not. She is buryed in the New Churchyard, as we calle it.'

Another woman, Annis Johnson, died of sore legs, the Bedlam cemetery register says:

'who had lyen at Goodwyfe Cooleman as she confessed iii weekes, was brought into the cage an theire died. Being of the age of xxx yeares.' Wife of Thomas Johnson of Edmonton'

The remains of people buried in Bedlam burial ground, which may number 30,000, were mainly from the lower echelons of society and could not afford proper burial or were interred there when churches were overwhelmed by deaths from the Black Plague. Some buried there did not adhere to a religious faith and so were not buried in regular churchyard graves.
Bedlam burial ground was the first cemetery in London during the Christian era not affiliated with a local church. The people who managed the burial ground did not keep records of who was buried. But some parishes who had their deceased members buried there did keep records, which are now held at the London Metropolitan archives.
Established in 1247, the notorious Bethlem (“Bedlam”) Royal Hospital was the first dedicated psychiatric institution in Europe and possibly the most famous specialist facility for care and control of the mentally ill, so much so that the word bedlam has long been synonymous with madness and chaos.
About 3,500 skeletons have been disinterred so far and are being examined scientifically. After the work is complete the bodies will be reburied in consecrated ground.
“This research is a window into one of the most turbulent periods of London’s past,” Carver said earlier in 2015. “These people lived through civil wars, the Restoration, Shakespeare’s plays, the birth of modern industry, plague and the Great Fire. It is a real privilege to be able to use Europe’s largest construction project to uncover more knowledge about this fascinating period of history.”

Slip-on flat shoe of the 16^th century found by Crossrail archaeologists (Crossrail photo)

Archaeologists have found more than 10,000 artifacts from a span of 55 million years at Crossrail's 40 London construction sites.
Featured image: Crossrail archaeologists excavate an apparent mass grave at the Bedlam hospital cemetery (Crossrail photo)

By Mark Miller

Ancient Origins

New study claims gerbils, not rats, responsible for bringing plague to Europe

Bubonic plague, the most common form, is associated with painful, swollen lymph nodes, called buboes as shown above. After an incubation period of two to six days, symptoms appear, including severe malaise, headache, shaking chills and fever. P (CDC)
For hundreds of years, the arrival of the bubonic plague in Europe in the mid-14th century has been blamed on rats. However, a new study released this week has put a different rodent under suspicion: gerbils.
Scientists at the University of Oslo in Norway have claimed that that the deadly disease was repeatedly brought to Europe from Asia via trade routes such as the Silk Road, and with gerbils, not rats as the carriers.

 

"If we're right," study co-author Nils Christian Stenseth told the BBC, "we'll have to rewrite that part of history."
The study examined over 7,700 tree ring records that revealed climate information about Europe during that period. They found that outbreaks in Europe occurred approximately 15 years after a spell of wet weather and warmer temperatures in Asia, which would have bolstered the gerbil and flea populations. By contrast, the timing of the outbreaks in Europe did not appear to coincide with any weather pattern on the continent.
Previously, black rats who had stowed away on merchant ships were thought to have enabled the plague to establish itself in Europe, with fleas spreading the bacteria by jumping from infected rat to humans. However, Stenseth told NPR that according to that theory, rats and their fleas should still be spreading plague in European cities today, when in fact, it has been nearly 300 years since a major outbreak.
The study theorizes that fleas carrying the plague bacterium jumped from gerbils to pack animals and humans, some of whom were traders who brought the disease to Europe. The next step is to analyze the DNA of plague bacteria, which can be found in the skeletons of its victims. If the Oslo theory is correct, the bacterial DNA would vary widely across each outbreak, as the disease would have likely changed each time it entered Europe.
Historians have estimated that the first outbreak of plague in medieval Europe, between 1346 and 1353, killed between 75 million and 200 million people, at least a third of the continent's population.
Click for more from the BBC.
Fox News

It Got Better: Life Improved After Black Death, Study Finds

By Stephanie Pappas, Senior Writer

 

This 1977 image shows the necrotic flesh that gave the Black Death its name. This symptom is known as acral gangrene.
Credit: CDC/ William Archibald

 

 

 

The Black Death, a plague that first devastated Europe in the 1300s, had a silver lining. After the ravages of the disease, surviving Europeans lived longer, a new study finds.

An analysis of bones in London cemeteries from before and after the plague reveals that people had a lower risk of dying at any age after the first plague outbreak compared with before. In the centuries before the Black Death, about 10 percent of people lived past age 70, said study researcher Sharon DeWitte, a biological anthropologist at the University of South Carolina. In the centuries after, more than 20 percent of people lived past that age.

"It is definitely a signal of something very important happening with survivorship," DeWitte told Live Science

 

The plague years

The Black Death, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium, first exploded in Europe between 1347 and 1351. The estimated number of deaths ranges from 75 million to 200 million, or between 30 percent and 50 percent of Europe's population. Sufferers developed hugely swollen lymph nodes, fevers and rashes, and vomited blood. The symptom that gave the disease its name was black spots on the skin where the flesh had died.
Scientists long believed that the Black Death killed indiscriminately. But DeWitte's previous research found the plague was like many sicknesses: It preferentially killed the very old and those already in poor health.
That discovery raised the question of whether the plague acted as a "force of selection, by targeting frail people," DeWitte said. If people's susceptibility to the plague was somehow genetic — perhaps they had weaker immune systems, or other health problems with a genetic basis — then those who survived might pass along stronger genes to their children, resulting in a hardier post-plague population.
In fact, research published in February in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that the plague did write itself into human genomes: The descendants of plague-affected populations share certain changes in some immune genes.
Post-plague comeback
To test the idea, DeWitte analyzed bones from London cemeteries housed at the Museum of London's Centre for Human Bioarchaeology. She studied 464 skeletons from three burial grounds dating to the 11th and 12th centuries, before the plague. Another 133 skeletons came from a cemetery used after the Black Death, from the 14th into the 16th century.
These cemeteries provided a mix of people from different socioeconomic classes and ages.
The longevity boost seen after the plague could have come as a result of the plague weeding out the weak and frail, DeWitte said, or it could have been because of another plague side effect. With as much as half of the population dead, survivors in the post-plague era had more resources available to them. Historical documentation records an improvement in diet, especially among the poor, DeWitte said.
"They were eating more meat and fish and better-quality bread, and in greater quantities," she said.
Or the effect could be a combination of both natural selection and improved diet, DeWitte said. She's now starting a project to find out whether Europe's population was particularly unhealthy prior to the Black Death, and if health trends may have given the pestilence a foothold.  
The Black Death was an emerging disease in the 14th century, DeWitte said, not unlike HIV or Ebola today. Understanding how human populations responded gives us more knowledge about how disease and humanity interact, she said. Y. pestis strains still cause bubonic plague today, though not at the pandemic levels seen in the Middle Ages.
"Diseases like the Black Death have the ability to powerfully shape human demography and human biology," DeWitte said.

http://www.livescience.com/45428-health-improved-black-death.html

Black death was not spread by rat fleas, say researchers

 

Black death researchers extracted plague DNA from 14th century skulls found in east London. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA

 

Evidence from skulls in east London shows plague had to have been airborne to spread so quickly

Vanessa Thorpe
The Observer

Archaeologists and forensic scientists who have examined 25 skeletons unearthed in the Clerkenwell area of London a year ago believe they have uncovered the truth about the nature of the Black Death that ravaged Britain and Europe in the mid-14th century.
Analysis of the bodies and of wills registered in London at the time has cast doubt on "facts" that every schoolchild has learned for decades: that the epidemic was caused by a highly contagious strain spread by the fleas on rats.
Now evidence taken from the human remains found in Charterhouse Square, to the north of the City of London, during excavations carried out as part of the construction of the Crossrail train line, have suggested a different cause: only an airborne infection could have spread so fast and killed so quickly.
The Black Death arrived in Britain from central Asia in the autumn of 1348 and by late spring the following year it had killed six out of every 10 people in London. Such a rate of destruction would kill five million now. By extracting the DNA of the disease bacterium, Yersinia pestis, from the largest teeth in some of the skulls retrieved from the square, the scientists were able to compare the strain of bubonic plague preserved there with that which was recently responsible for killing 60 people in Madagascar. To their surprise, the 14th-century strain, the cause of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history, was no more virulent than today's disease. The DNA codes were an almost perfect match.
According to scientists working at Public Health England in Porton Down, for any plague to spread at such a pace it must have got into the lungs of victims who were malnourished and then been spread by coughs and sneezes. It was therefore a pneumonic plague rather than a bubonic plague. Infection was spread human to human, rather than by rat fleas that bit a sick person and then bit another victim. "As an explanation [rat fleas] for the Black Death in its own right, it simply isn't good enough. It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics," said Dr Tim Brooks from Porton Down, who will put his theory in a Channel 4 documentary, Secret History: The Return of the Black Death, next Sunday.
To support his argument, Brooks has looked at what happened in Suffolk in 1906 when plague killed a family and then spread to a neighbour who had come to help. The culprit was pneumonic plague, which had settled in the lungs of the victims and was spread through infected breath.
The skeletons at Charterhouse Square reveal that the population of London was also in generally poor health when the disease struck. Crossrail's archaeology contractor, Don Walker, and Jelena Bekvalacs of the Museum of London found evidence of rickets, anaemia, bad teeth and childhood malnutrition.
In support of the case that this was a fast-acting, direct contagion, archaeologist Dr Barney Sloane found that in the medieval City of London all wills had to be registered at the Court of Hustings. These led him to believe that 60% of Londoners were wiped out.
Antibiotics can today prevent the disease from becoming pneumonic. In the spring of 1349, the death rate did not ease until Pentecost on 31 May

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/29/black-death-not-spread-rat-fleas-london-plague