Medieval Cemetery Uncovered During Paris Renovations

Hola darlings!

I have been officially retired since my last day of work on January 30, 2015. 

I took a nice long break to just do NOTHING AT ALL other than binge view Property Brothers and other home improvement and cooking shows online, LOL!  Oh, and cooking and eating, and making sure that my new tribe of squirrels are the fattest in Milwaukee County.  And a tribe they are, indeed; I've got probably 30 squirrels who visit regularly now, looking for hazelnuts and peanuts.  Me bad, I know, encouraging over-population of squirrels and it's costing a small fortune to keep myself in "nuts" -- but so much fun getting to know my new tribe of critters and they are so entertaining. I have a new "gimpy" squirrel who looked like he took the worse part of a bar fight (or a run-in with a car or predator), several pregnant females, a newly "down the tree" batch of fledglings, an oldster with white hair (the equivalent of a "grey haired" human) and one white opaque eye, and one totally blind squirrel whom I am not sure how he/she managed to survive, but has found its way to my yard somehow.  It's been rather difficult feeding it in all the snow we've had -- it cannot see the food I toss out into its pathway, it has to find it by blundering around until it stumbles across something, and even though I've gotten quite good at getting the nuts to land directly in front of the squirrel, often-times it just goes right over the nuts!  It's awful to watch, I want to rush out and put the nuts into its little paws, but know I cannot do that! 

I know I have a lot of catching up to do, but the new season premiere of Hell's Kitchen in on t.v. tonight and I won't be missing it, so I'll save starting my catch-up for tomorrow -- but it will be competing with searching for just the PERFECT final touches for my Mistress Bedroom make-over (area rugs and art work).  But I saw this article this evening and want to share it with you:

Hundreds of Medieval Bodies Found Under Paris Supermarket

By Tia Ghose 11 hours ago

More than 200 bodies were recently unearthed in several mass burials beneath a Paris supermarket.

The bodies, which were lined up head to feet, were found at the site of an ancient cemetery attached to the Trinity Hospital, which was founded in the 13th century.

Though it's not clear exactly how these ancient people died, the trove of bodies could reveal insights into how people in the Middle Ages buried their dead during epidemics or famine, the researchers involved said.

Supermarket renovations

The burials were discovered during renovations to the basement of the Monoprix Réaumur-Sébastopol supermarket, located in the second-arrondissement neighborhood of Paris. As workers lowered the floor level of the basement, they found a shocking surprise: the bodies of men, women and children, neatly arranged in what looked to be mass graves. [See Images of the Ancient Hospital Burials]

The site was once the location of the Trinity Hospital, which was founded in 1202 by two German noblemen. The hospital was conceived not just as a place to provide care for the sick, but also as one where weary pilgrims and travelers could rest and enjoy themselves, according to a 1983 presentation given at the French Society on the History of Medicine.

But in 1353, during the height of the Black Death, the hospital also opened a cemetery, which provided a lucrative side business for the religious folk who operated the hospital, according to the presentation. During that catastrophic period, hundreds of people a day died in the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, the city's oldest hospital, and burial space was tough to find in the crowded city. Occasionally, the overflow bodies were buried at the Trinity Hospital site, according to the presentation.

Mass death

So far, archaeologists have uncovered about eight mass burial pits on different levels of the site. Seven of those sites hold between five and 20 individuals, while the remaining pit contains more than 150 bodies, according to a statement about the findings.

The bodies were laid down methodically in neat rows, head to feet, with one burial extending beyond the boundaries of the excavation. The pits contain the skeletons of men and women, old and young, none of which show obvious signs of injury or disease.

Given the huge number of skeletons found, it seems likely the bodies were buried during some mass medical crisis, when too many people were dying at once to provide individual burials, the researchers note in the statement.

As a follow-up, the team plans to use radioactive isotopes of carbon (elements of carbon with different numbers of neutrons) to estimate when these people lived. By combining this data with ancient texts and maps of Medieval Paris, researchers hope to reveal how and when these people died.

In the 1500s, the Trinity Hospital converted to a site where little boys and girls trained as apprentices. By the 1700s, the site fell into disrepair. During the French Revolution, the hospital was destroyed and the remaining structures were turned into stables for animals, according to the presentation.

Europe's Black Death Came from China

A story of genetic detective work, from The New York Times. It's fascinating - but John Kelly in his fine book "The Gerat Mortality" in 2006 had already pegged Yertsinia pestis coming from the Far East to spread death far and wide, beginning with the great plague during the time of Justinian.

Europe’s Plagues Came From China, Study Finds
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: October 31, 2010

The great waves of plague that twice devastated Europe and changed the course of history had their origins in China, a team of medical geneticists reported Sunday, as did a third plague outbreak that struck less harmfully in the 19th century.

And in separate research, a team of biologists reported conclusively this month that the causative agent of the most deadly plague, the Black Death, was the bacterium known as Yersinia pestis. This agent had always been the favored cause, but a vigorous minority of biologists and historians have argued the Black Death differed from modern cases of plague studied in India, and therefore must have had a different cause.

The Black Death began in Europe in 1347 and carried off an estimated 30 percent or more of the population of Europe. For centuries the epidemic continued to strike every 10 years or so, its last major outbreak being the Great Plague of London from 1665 to 1666. The disease is spread by rats and transmitted to people by fleas or, in some cases, directly by breathing.

One team of biologists, led by Barbara Bramanti of the Institut Pasteur in Paris and Stephanie Haensch of Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, analyzed ancient DNA and proteins from plague pits, the mass burial grounds across Europe in which the dead were interred. Writing in the journal PLoS Pathogens this month, they say their findings put beyond doubt that the Black Death was brought about by Yersinia pestis.

Dr. Bramanti’s team was able to distinguish two strains of the Black Death plague bacterium, which differ both from each other and from the three principal strains in the world today. They infer that medieval Europe must have been invaded by two different sources of Yersinia pestis. One strain reached the port of Marseilles on France’s southern coast in 1347, spread rapidly across France and by 1349 had reached Hereford, a busy English market town and pilgrimage center near the Welsh border.

The strain of bacterium analyzed from the bones and teeth of a Hereford plague pit dug in 1349 is identical to that from a plague pit of 1348 in southern France, suggesting a direct route of travel. But a plague pit in the Dutch town of Bergen op Zoom has bacteria of a different strain, which the researchers infer arrived from Norway.

The Black Death is the middle of three great waves of plague that have hit in historical times. The first appeared in the 6th century during the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, reaching his capital, Constantinople, on grain ships from Egypt. The Justinian plague, as historians call it, is thought to have killed perhaps half the population of Europe and to have eased the Arab takeover of Byzantine provinces in the Near East and Africa.

The third great wave of plague began in China’s Yunnan province in 1894, emerged in Hong Kong and then spread via shipping routes throughout the world. It reached the United States through a plague ship from Hong Kong that docked at Hawaii, where plague broke out in December 1899, and then San Francisco, whose plague epidemic began in March 1900.

The three plague waves have now been tied together in common family tree by a team of medical geneticists led by Mark Achtman of University College Cork in Ireland. By looking at genetic variations in living strains of Yersinia pestis, Dr. Achtman’s team has reconstructed a family tree of the bacterium. By counting the number of genetic changes, which clock up at a generally steady rate, they have dated the branch points of the tree, which enables the major branches to be correlated with historical events.

In the issue of Nature Genetics published online Sunday, they conclude that all three of the great waves of plague originated from China, where the root of their tree is situated. Plague would have reached Europe across the Silk Road, they say. An epidemic of plague that reached East Africa was probably spread by the voyages of the Chinese admiral Zheng He who led a fleet of 300 ships to Africa in 1409.

“What’s exciting is that we are able to reconstruct the historical routes of bacterial disease over centuries,” Dr. Achtman said.

Lester K. Little, an expert on the Justinian plague at Smith College, said in an interview from Bergamo, Italy, that the epidemic was first reported by the Byzantine historian Procopius in 541 A.D. from the ancient port of Pelusium, near Suez in Egypt. Historians had assumed it arrived there from the Red Sea or Africa, but the Chinese origin now suggested by the geneticists is possible, Dr. Little said.

The geneticists’ work is “immensely impressive,” Dr. Little said, and adds a third leg to the studies of plague by historians and by archaeologists.

The likely origin of the plague in China has nothing to do with its people or crowded cities, Dr. Achtman said. The bacterium has no interest in people, whom it slaughters by accident. Its natural hosts are various species of rodent such as marmots and voles, which are found throughout China.

Nuns Died Rendering Aid During Plague Outbreak

The headline of this article is misleading - of course not all nuns were wiped out due to the Plague! Story from MSNBC.com Renaissance nuns wiped out by plague Study: Religious orders in France lost lives providing medical care for poor By Jennifer Viegas updated 11:11 a.m. CT, Fri., Feb. 6, 2009 Nuns and priests sacrificed their own lives to provide medical care for the poor in Renaissance France, according to a new study that implicates exposure to contagious plague victims in the deaths of several religious order members. The study is among the first to find that plague, a deadly bacterial disease also known as "the Black Death," can be quickly and accurately identified in ancient human remains. Several recently identified women who died after caring for plague victims were all Benedictine nuns from the Sainte-Croix Abbey's chapter house near Poitiers, France. "The Abbess [Mother Superior] of Sainte-Croix was known to be an extremely generous person who spent all of her life looking after the poor," lead author Raffaella Bianucci told Discovery News. Bianucci, an anthropologist in the Department of Animal and Human Biology at the University of Turin, added that the woman was the Countess Charlotte Flandrina of Nassau, the fourth daughter of Prince William I of Orange. When the countess became a Roman Catholic nun, she sold most of her valuables to pay for food and medical care for the region's poor, many of whom caught the plague from soldiers fighting in the Thirty Years War. "There is evidence of food distribution to the people, and it seems that laymen had free access to the convent's infirmary," Bianucci said. Historical accounts suggest that nuns caring for the plague victims succumbed to the disease sometime between 1628 and 1632. At that time, General Vicar Jean Filleau ordered the remaining nuns to leave the cloister and retreat to a seaside residence. With funding from Compagnia di San Paolo, Bianucci and her team analyzed skeletons of Saint-Croix Abbey nuns whose corpses were found resting on layers of the disinfectant calcium oxide, or lime. The researchers applied an "RDT dipstick test" to the bones and teeth. Similar to a home pregnancy test, the "dipstick" changes color if it detects the presence of markers for Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes plague. The nuns tested positive for the deadly infection, according to the study, which will be published in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. The scientists also performed the test on priests buried near the altar of Saint-Nicolas' Church in La Chaize-le-Vicomte, in central France. The priests also tested positive. Although historical records are less clear about the priests' contact with local plague victims, Bianucci said the men must have been around "the parishioners, as their ministry required, and certainly assisted people who were dying," such as by administering last rights. "It will be most interesting to see it (the plague dipstick test) applied to a wide array of tissues of varying ages in the future," said Arthur Aufderheide, director of the Paleobiology Laboratory at the University of Minnesota's Medical School, Duluth Campus.