ANTHROP 2U03 Lecture 15: Guest-Speaker-2-Notes
8 Jan 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Modern plague: one bubo, depression, rarely communicated person to person, associated with grain trade, no age or sex discrimination. Black death/justinian: multiple bubos, hysteria, person to person transmission, rates not always present. Looking for plague: one of the best places to look for plague: ancient london -> east smithfield cemetery used for 2 years london experienced terrible plague. Found y. pestis bacterial dna in plague of justinian victims: not ancestral to strain that involved in black death. First strain evolved from rodent strains many times throughout: end of second pandemic not ancestral to modern strains but evolved from early second pandemic. First pandemic strains started in central asia, spread through mediterranean and europe, then died out. Decoding black death: requires multi-disciplinary approach: art history, text analysis of chronicles and other documents to determine symptoms and spread, analysis of modern local epidemics, entomology, zoology, ancient dna and human remain. Other plagues of history: plague of athens.
