Molecular Confirmation of Yersinia pestis in 6th century Bavaria

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 ranging from 530 to 680, all consistent with the 541 pandemic and its aftermath. Harbeck et al (2013) tested 19 individuals from 12 multiple graves. From these, there were eight positive samples, but only one produced enough aDNA to do some SNP genotyping. Added to the previous paper, this makes 11 positive individuals from this cemetery. Given the tenuous survival of aDNA, 11 positive individuals out of 21 tested in the two combined papers is a very good success rate. This is a cemetery that the F1 antigen test would be interesting since it could be used on the entire cemetery without great cost or labor. More sensitive than aDNA, the antigen test could tell us the percentage of plague deaths in the cemetery.

Individual A120 was screened with several SNPs that mapped it to an early region of the phylogenetic tree in the 0.ANT section. This makes the Plague of Justinian isolate ancestral to the Black Death isolates (yellow boxes below) from East Smithfield. This section whose only point of diversity is 0.ANT1 at node 4. Date predictions for the nodes of diversity in the tree fits with the Plague of Justinian falling in this region.  Modern isolates that  form this region of the phylogenetic tree all come from central Asia (around Tibet), suggesting that like the Black Death, the Plague of Justinian also originated in Asia. Overall, everything fits in well with expectations for the first pandemic.

(Harbeck et al, 2013. Fig. 1)

Reference:

Harbeck M, Seifert L, Hänsch S, Wagner DM, Birdsell D, et al. (2013) Yersinia pestis DNA from Skeletal Remains from the 6th Century AD Reveals Insights into Justinianic Plague. PLoS Pathog 9(5): e1003349. doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1003349

Wiechmann I, & Grupe G (2005). Detection of Yersinia pestis DNA in two early medieval skeletal finds from Aschheim (Upper Bavaria, 6th century A.D.). American journal of physical anthropology, 126 (1), 48-55 PMID: 15386257

Visualizing the Plague of Justinian in the Mediterranean

Browsing through Academia.edu this morning I came across some graphics from the Topographies of Entanglements project from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Division of Byzantine Research. Unfortunately there is very little explanation with these graphics.

Comparing these two graphs they are not conveying exactly the same information.  How do we define a wave of plague? Does it have to show directional movement? How far does it have to go?  Given the sparse information from this period, accurately defining waves must be tentative.   The second graph, may be a more realistic representation. The second graph charts individual epidemic outbreak records giving a better representation of scale and that the gaps between the waves are not plague-free. Given the sparse records in the early medieval period, we can not take the lack of reports in 580 and 610 to mean that the plague disappeared completely. Plague was also occurring outside of the Mediterranean in these low years. For example the major wave of plague to devastate Britain and Ireland was from 664-668.

From: Visualising waves of Plague epidemics in the Mediterranean and the Near East, 541-750 AD by Topographies of Entanglements. Graphics by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, 2013. (Here converted from tiff files to jpg.)

They took their data from Dionysios Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics (Ashgate, 2004).

Health and Healing Sessions at Kalamazoo 2012

Regular readers might remember that last fall I was regularly posting and tweeting a call for papers for a session on health and healing in early medieval Europe for the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in 2012. The schedule for the Congress is now out so I can tell everyone all about it. As you can see I got a great response to my CFP and the Congress committee let me put together two sessions. So without further ado, here are the sessions co-sponsored by The Heroic Age and Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages.

Session 264 (Friday 1:30)
Schneider 1255

Health and Healing in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland
Presider: Deanna Forsman, North Hennepin Community College

• Famine and Pestilence in the Irish Sea Region, 500–800 AD: Michelle Ziegler
• Regional Patterns of Health in Early Medieval Ireland: Distributions of Non-specific Stress Indicators: Mara Tesorieri, Univ. College Cork
• The Experience and Practice of Medicine by the Laity in Anglo-Saxon England: Julia Bolotina, Univ. of Cambridge
• By Rome, or By Spain? Possible Mediterranean Origins of Irish Holy Well Veneration: Silas J. Mallery, North Hennepin Community College

Session 319 (Friday 3:30)
Schneider 1255

Medical Texts of the Early Medieval Mediterranean
Presider: Michelle Ziegler

• Animal-Derived Medicines in Early Medieval Pharmacy: Jayna Brett, Centre for Medieval Studies, Univ. of Toronto
• A Medieval Hippocrates? The construction of the Articella during the eleventh century.: Marco A. Viniegra, Harvard Univ.
• Book-Learning and Medicine in Medieval Byzantium: Theory and Practice in the Alexiad of Anna Comnena: Glen M. Cooper, Brigham Young Univ.

Contagions Round-up 19: Loads of Links for Year’s End

Since my usual fare is not very festive, I’m going to wrap up this year with round-ups and similar stuff.

Holiday Posts

Fungal art from sciencingsara.tumblr.com h/t to The Febrile Muse

A Schooner of Science brings us the science of holly.

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog brings us a holiday update and some holiday riddles.

Jonathan Jarrett of A Corner of Tenth Century Europe brings us a Christmas Charter madlib if you have any disposable land to unload.

Carl Pyrdum of Got Medieval brings us the war on Christmas,  Uther’s Christmas Knight, and a new medieval marginalia. He also has a guest post by Sir Ten-to-Three on Christmas Past.

Puff the Mutant Dragon brings us the history and science of the Poinsettia.

William Eamon of the Labrynth of Nature brings us the story of Johannes Kepler and the Star of Bethleham.

Continuity of history and science

Continuing with  history of science, Kate Stidham of the group blog Wonders and Marvels tells us about a 17th century text called the Compleat Midwife Practice and its complicated authorship and Lauren Renaud tells us about how the dental woes of the Sun King led to the profession of dentistry.

The History of Vaccines Blog brings us news that mammalian cell lines will be used to produce new influenza vaccines, replacing the 50-year-old egg method. This is also covered by Vincent Rancello of the Virology Blog who argues that this is not the direction we need to be going and also a post on the Megavirus, the largest virus ever found.

Puff the Mutant Dragon also brings us up to date on the recent controversy over lab-bred avian flu and fears that it is a biosecurity risk.

Jennifer Frazer of The Artful Amoeba has a post on the toxic vapors produced by red-tides in the Gulf of Mexico and another on  brain-eating amoebas.

Michael Walsh of Infectious Landscape brings us up-to-date on Amoebaosis of the GI system, sometimes referred to as amoebic dysentery. At his Germscape microblog, Michael Walsh has posted several recent maps on malaria epidemiology, the most recent one can be found here but browse the last several posts for more on malaria. He has also posted the 2011 map of West Nile virus transmission in the European Union.

Maryn McKenna of Superbug has been busy with her bad bugs. Lets start with a good post on the dangers of sleeping with your pet, then on the FDAs failure to stop agricultural antibiotic abuse, and wind up with fecal transplants.

Anthropology

Anthropologist Kate Clancy of Context and Variation writes an important post on the role of science blogging in academia.

Krystal D’Costa of Anthropology in Practice is thinking about toys and finding marbles, and why we deny the sick role.

Patrick Clarkin has an interesting post on the growth differences in growing up in North Korea and South Korea and a post on the opportunity costs of war.

Katy Meyer of  Bones Don’t Lie writes about height variation in medieval Italy, on her frustration over a lack of aging standards for human remains, and about cranial modification (or the original cone heads) and still no discussion of the Huns!!!

Medieval Miscellany

I wrote about an outbreak of plague in Lombardy in the 560s on my blog Heavenfield.

Tim Clarkson of Senchus asks if Merlin really existed?

Mak Wilson of Badonicus writes a two-part post on the mysterious Attacotti people of Roman Britain. Part two is here.

Guy Halsall of Historian on the Edge revisits good ole King Chilperic.

Jonathan Jarrett of A Corner of the Tenth Century brings us a little propaganda stamped right into coinage during the Investiture Controversy.

Esmerald’s Cumbrian History and Folklore explains the relationship between folklore of elf-shot by mermaids and some of our modern medical terms.

Have a Happy New Year and I’ll be back with new content after the New Year.

Vampire Prevention in Eighth Century Ireland

Cropped photo from IT Sligo news.

About a year ago, I wrote of the discovery of a ‘vampire’ in a medieval plague cemetery in Venice. News came out Monday of a similar find of not one but two men with stones thrust into their mouths at a site  at Kilteasheen, near Loch Key, Knockvicar in Co Roscommon, Ireland. As you can see from our friend to the right here, there is a baseball size rock stuffed in his mouth. These rocks are usually interpreted as a prevention method to keep the dead from feeding on other corpses or rising to attack the living. These men were not buried at the same time, but both were buried in the early eighth century. One was old, and the other was younger, laying side by side, making me wonder if we have a cursed family. No indication of DNA analysis to look for kinship between the men.

These  two 8th century men were among nearly 137 skeletons excavated by Chris Read of “Applied Archaeology at IT Sligo” and Dr Thomas Finan of Saint Louis University between 2005 and 2009. (It is coming to light now for a British documentary that will air in the US on the National Geographic channel in 2012.) They estimated that the site holds about 3000 skeletons dating from 700 to 1400.

What really caught my attention is that they originally believed they had found a Black Death grave site. They ditched this hypothesis when the radiocarbon date came back as c. 700. Really? Why? Ireland had a terrible plague in 664 and again in about 683. There was also an infamous famine in c. 700. Any of these events could produce a mass grave. The site is near where the Boyle river connects with Lough Key making it a travel corridor, latter associated with the O’Conor kings of Connacht. The press releases doesn’t mention the spread of radiocarbon dates but with a 700 year span of time, 3000 skeletons comes out to only about 4-5 per year. This is easily achievable for any medieval power center.  This site sounds like an ideal place to study the bioarchaeology of a medieval Irish population.

UPDATE (9/18)

Sources: “Documentary focus on unique deviant burial find” IT Sligo News, 2011.

Paddy Clancy, “Skeletons reveal our ancestors’ fear of the undead” Irish Examiner, Sept. 12, 2011