Pregnancy, ‘coffin birth’, and the Black Death

by Michelle Ziegler The Genoese have always been central in the legend of the start of the Black Death, by their own claim, linking a siege of the Genoese at Kaffa to the spread of the epidemic in the Mediterranean. Last month the first confirmed plague graves in the region of Genoa were reported by...

Ötzi’s Lyme Disease in Context

One of the ancient DNA finds that continues to intrigue me is the discovery of Borrelia burgdorferi, the agent of Lyme disease, in Ötzi the 5300-year-old ice mummy from the Italian Alps. As far as I know, this is the only finding of B. burgdorferi in ancient remains of any date.  I discussed the initial report...

Early use of the term ‘malaria’

Early use of the term 'malaria' I was reading Robert Sallares' Malaria and Rome this evening and I noticed some information on the earliest use of the term 'malaria' that I thought would be worth sharing. As we have all learned, malaria comes from the Italian mal' aria, meaning 'bad air'. A few other interesting facts:...

Metagenomics, Lyme Disease, and the Tyrolean Iceman’s Tattoos

When the genetic analysis of the 5,300 year old Tyrolean Iceman, better known as Ötzi, was published in February, most of the attention was naturally focused on his genomic DNA. His genomic DNA produced some interesting results: he had brown eyes, blood type O+, was probably lactose intolerant and from a southern European gene pool....

Plague at the Siege of Caffa, 1346

The first stage of the Black Death among Europeans was said to begin with the whoosh of a Mongol trebuchet. Gabriele De' Mussi, a lawyer from near Genoa writing in about 1348, is believed to have recorded the account of the earliest use of plague as  weapon of war at Caffa in 1346. "The dying...

Plague Detection by Immuno-PCR

Once again the Marseille research group is pushing the bounds of plague detection. This time their target is looking for a more sensitive method of detecting non-nucleic acid biomolecules from Yersinia pestis, 'the plague'. We have now moved into an era where PCR is being used in the mechanics of testing, rather than amplifying the...

Detecting pathogens in medieval Venice

Medieval Venice was a trading empire, one of the busiest ports of the late medieval world. As a hub of commerce waves of plague visited and revisited Venice in 1348, 1462, 1485, 1506, 1575-1577, and 1630-1632 with the last two producing mortality rates around 30% of the population (Tran et al, 2011). As we all...

The Vampire in the Plague Pit

Amid the chaos of a mass grave of plague victims, the 2006-2007 summer project team from the Archeoclub of Venice got a surprise. Among the dead they found evidence of belief in the undead, fear of the vampire. So how do you stop the undead from feasting on the corpses in the mass grave?  The...