Defoe's account of people being buried in heaps is not necessarily at odds with this excavation of neat coffin burials.<p>The plague didn't instantly reach full intensity on day one. During the early phases of the epidemic, deaths were not yet widespread enough to require mass graves, and burials proceeded semi-normally.<p>During the later, more intense phases, things were much worse. There were both more bodies needing to be buried and fewer available funerary service providers such as coffinmakers and undertakers around to deal with them, since many had themselves either died of the plague or fled the city. Faced with growing heaps of rotting infectious corpses in the streets, hastily dug mass graves were often resorted to by the survivors.
"To reassure anyone worried whether plague bacterium was released from the excavation work or scientific analysis, it doesn't survive in the ground."
I am happy with every new ancient DNA sequence of plague that becomes available. Combined, they can be used to figure out the way the disease spread across Eurasia and persisted in Europe.<p>That said, I would like these news articles to actually link to the scientific paper, or if the paper is not published yet/still under review, at least mention that.
> To reassure anyone worried whether plague bacterium was released from the excavation work or scientific analysis, it doesn't survive in the ground.<p>Thank god, what a relief !<p>To be frank, looking at the pictures of students working on site,that very question crossed my mind.
Can thus bacterias be dangerous somehow? For example be more potent than the plague that sometimes surfaces today.<p>The people in the pictures do not appear to wear much protection.
It seems to me, the people (inn-keepers, etc) were way too accepting of the refugees. They should have been barricading the town gates. Many of them paid with their lives, and their family's lives.
I'm still reading A Journal of the Plague Year, it's fascinating and surprisingly modern in tone, despite the archaic language. It's like one of those zombie apocalypse films, except this guy was living it for real. Recommended :)