Finally the Plague of Justinian is plague! Now hopefully biological anthropologists will start looking in Britain (like at Bamburgh’s cemetery).
Erasing any lingering doubts about the agent of the Plague of Justinian, a group of German biological anthropologists have shown conclusively that Yersinia pestis caused an epidemic in a 6th century Bavarian cemetery at Aschheim. Harbeck et al (2013) provide a convincing refutation of previous theories about the etiologic agent of the Plague of Justinian. Returning to the same cemetery where plague was previously reported, two independent labs using the most modern standards to prevent contamination confirmed Yersinia pestis from multiple burials within the cemetery making this the best characterized Early Medieval plague cemetery.
The cemetery, called Aschheim, is in Bavaria outside of Munich. It contains the remains of 438 people with an unusually high number of multiple graves but no disordered mass graves. The 19 multiple burials contained two to five individuals arranged in lines. The cemetery was dated archaeologically to 500-700 AD with remains being carbon dated…
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