Bioarchaeological Approaches: Disease & Death in Early Medieval France

The Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped the way we think about diseases, their transmission, and their impact on our lives. But are we the first to face such a crisis?

A shrinking written record marks past pandemics. But the victims remain, and from their strange burials and ancient DNA, the Science of the Human Past has begun to reconstruct what happened, in France and across western Eurasia, during the first pandemic of bubonic plague in the Roman Empire and its neighbors from 541 to 750 AD.

This conference marked the launch of a pioneering international investigation of anomalous burials in France that take us back to that first pandemic. French archaeologists and archaeologists with the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for Archaeoscience’s biomolecular discussed a myriad of discoveries in a new transatlantic collaboration with the advanced researchers of France.