![]() ![]() That's what we think happened here at Thornton," he said.Ī plan of the grave, highlighting the careful layout of individuals. When you find a mass grave, it tells you that the system's breaking down. "As people died, they were buried in a normal fashion - in individual graves in normal cemeteries. One explanation could be that even when many people died from the plague, life generally carried on "as normally as possible," Willmott said. But until now, no mass graves for people killed by the Black Death have been identified in rural communities. Mass graves of plague victims were already known from burial sites in London, where the disease spread like wildfire between people who lived packed closely together, and who died by the tens of thousands between 13, the researchers reported. The timing of the deaths coincided with outbreaks of plague in England, and analysis of molar teeth from 16 individuals in the grave revealed DNA from Yersinia pestis - the bacteria responsible for plague. "We can tell from the proportion of individuals that everyone is being affected, and everyone is dying," Willmott told Live Science. ![]() "But what we've got is not that profile at all," said lead study author Hugh Willmott, a senior lecturer of European historical archaeology at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. In medieval cemeteries, most of the graves typically are occupied by the very young and the very old, who were especially vulnerable to disease and fatal injury. (Image credit: University of Sheffield/Antiquity Publications Ltd.)Įxperts suspected that an epidemic was to blame, not only because of the number of bodies but also because of the wide range of victims' ages. A map of Thornton Abbey, highlighting the location of the mass grave, hospital and abbey. ![]()
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