Burial Archaeology and the First Plague Pandemic

Archaeological evidence from funerary contexts is largely ignored in current scholarship on first-pandemic plague, despite the important information that burials and cemeteries can provide about how plague might have affected societies. Skeletal (mainly dental) remains are used in the paleogenomic hunt for victims of plague (Yersinia pestis), but important contextual information is to be gained from plague-positive graves through bioarchaeological study of the complete skeleton and analysis of their funerary contexts, both of which are glaringly absent. We argue that future scholarship on the First Plague Pandemic must bring burial archaeology to the growing body of evidence, and archaeologists themselves must lead or be involved in this research. We present three ways in which burial archaeology can be used effectively to study the impact of first-pandemic plague on individuals and communities: by reconsidering whether we should be looking for an archaeology of “crisis” for this disease event, by evaluating burial archaeology (especially multiple burials) in its proper sociocultural context, and by examining bioarchaeological evidence from entire cemeteries where plague genomes are recovered in any quantity. We conclude by offering an example of how such archaeological evidence can be incorporated into interdisciplinary plague studies.