Presentations on the Plague from the European Association of Archaeologists, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2016

I just discovered that most of the presentations from the "Plague in Diachronic and Interdisciplinary Perspective" session of the Europan Association of Archaeologists meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania on 2 September 2016 are now on YouTube.  I think I have collected them all here. Enjoy 3 hours of plague talks! Introduction-Plague in diachronic and Interdisciplinary perspective 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...

Evolutionary Clues in 17th-Century Smallpox Genome

By Michelle Ziegler Smallpox is one of those diseases long believed to have an ancient pedigree, the suspected culprit of legendary epidemics. Yet, so far, smallpox hasn't made a big impression in ancient DNA surveys. If it was truly endemic throughout the Old World before 1492, so much so that it pops up in the...

Plague in 6th century Aschheim and Altenerding, Bavaria

Since I last wrote about Bavaria, the aDNA centers have been busy. With the accepted manuscript of the second new paper available this past week, its time for an update. The fourth paper on Aschheim not only confirmed the first three, but it also produced the first full genome of Yersinia pestis for the Plague...

Contagions: The Society for Historic Infectious Disease Studies

  Over the coming year, I would like to organize a new society specifically on the study of infectious diseases in the past.  It is called Contagions: Society for Historic Infectious Disease Studies. It is open to everyone working on contemporary or historical aspects infectious diseases that can be studied in the past. Examples of these...

Plague Dialogues: Monica Green and Boris Schmid on Plague Phylogeny (II)

Monica H. Green (monica.green@asu.edu,@MonicaMedHist) is a historian of medieval medicine. An elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, she teaches both global history and the global history of health. She was the editor in 2014 of Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, the inaugural issue of a new journal, The...

Plague Dialogues: Monica Green and Boris Schmid on Plague Phylogeny (I)

In keeping with this blog's goal to be a meeting ground for interdisciplinary discussions, I'll be hosting a series of dialogues between scholars in the humanities and sciences. If you would like to be involved in one of these dialogues, please use the contact form on the about page. On behalf of today's participants, I...

Keeping Bronze Age Yersinia pestis in Perspective

by Michelle Ziegler The latest plague news to splash across headlines is the discovery of Yersinia pestis aDNA in seven Bronze Age remains from Eurasia.  The most important findings in this new study are not anthropological; they are evolutionary. This paper allows us to drop a couple more evolutionary mile markers. Finding  7% of the...

A Migration Age Anglo-Saxon Leper

Paleomicrobiology and isotopic analysis has the ability to completely change what we know of past infectious diseases. A study published this month on a fifth century Anglo-Saxon skeleton is one of the most complete I have read. Lesions on skeletons found at Great Chesterfield in Essex, England, suggested possible leprosy. To confirm this diagnosis, they...