story highlights
Archaeologists find remains of suspected plague from 1665
Archaeologist says at least 40 coffins were placed in the burial site at the same time
Scientists hope remains may explain why London had no major plague outbreaks after 1665
London
CNN
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If you scour the surface of a 2,000-year-old city like London, you often find clues to its past – whether Roman, medieval or Remnants of the greatest conflict of the 20th century.
Three and a half hundred years ago, London suffered its last major outbreak of plague. At least 100,000 people, or a fifth of its population, died from the disease outbreak in the city.
Now archaeologists excavating a former burial ground as part of work to build a new rail link across London believe they may have found a “plague pit” – or mass burial site – where At least 30 victims were laid to rest.
It appears that the bodies were buried on the same day and there was a cemetery nearby. at Bedlam Cemetery dated to 1665, giving importance to the theory that he died in the outbreak of that year.
“This mass burial, very different from other individual burials found at Bedlam Cemetery, is a response to a horrific event,” said Jay Carver, the lead archaeologist for the Crossrail project.
“Only close analysis will tell whether this is the plague pit from the Great Plague in 1665, but we hope that this gruesome but exciting discovery will tell us about one of London’s most infamous killers.”
Carver told CNN that the burial site, opened last week, contains at least 40 different coffins, apparently all at the same time.
“They were stacked, some even towards them, some oriented north-south and squeezing as much as possible,” he said, instead being placed west-to-east as was customary. Was.
Carver noted that the careful positioning of the coffins, and the fact that they were used, contrasted with many images of plague pits from the 17th century, in which corpses piled high on carts were thrown into large open graves, Carver said.
How do we still have plague centuries after the Black Death?
Due to begin operations in 2018, excavations are taking place at Liverpool Street in the City of London as part of work to build a new station entrance for the Crossrail Link.
It has already revealed a wealth of historical artifacts, which have long been buried under several feet of mud and concrete. According to Crossrail, preliminary excavations at the Liverpool Street site in 2011 and 2012 found more than 400 skeletons.
Now experts at the Museum of London Archaeology will analyze the latest discovery in hopes of whether the cause of death was bubonic plague or some other pandemic.
The number of skeletons found together could provide new clues, said Mike Henderson, the museum’s senior osteologist. “We hope that detailed osteological analysis will help determine whether these people were exposed to the Great Plague and learn more about the development of this potentially deadly disease.”
An unsolved mystery is why the outbreak was the last major to afflict London in 1665.
“The particular question is, what was responsible? Exactly which pathogen, which bacteria, formed the outbreak of the Great Plague in the 17th century? Carver said.
“It doesn’t seem to be coming back, so there has been some change in the way people live. People say that the Great Fire of London in 1666 had something to do with the end of the events of the Great Plague, but Through the scientific studies we can do these days on DNA from samples of these skeletons, we may be able to tell which pathogens are responsible for that outbreak and perhaps why it stopped.”
The people working at the grave site are at no risk of getting the plague, he said, because the bacteria have long since decomposed.
Adult dies from plague in Colorado
The Yersinia pestis bacterium that is behind the plague is found mainly in rodents, especially rats, and in the fleas that feed on them, states the US National Institutes of Health website, and is still present today.
Each year, about 10 to 20 people in the United States develop plague from flea or rodent bites, mostly from infected prairie dogs in rural Southwestern areas, the NIH says. About one in seven of those infected die. No person-to-person transmission has been recorded in the past 90 years.
The NIH says that in the 1300s, the Black Death killed an estimated 20 million to 30 million people in Europe. In the mid-19th century, another 12 million people were affected by this crisis in China, and there have been smaller outbreaks elsewhere.
Altogether over 20,000 Londoners are believed to have been buried. In Bedlam Cemetery, used from From 1569 to at least 1738.
According to Crossrail, its excavation in London is the largest archeological project in Britain, with more than 10,000 artifacts found at more than 40 sites.
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