@misc{10481/73258,
year = {2022},
month = {2},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10481/73258},
abstract = {The Black Death (1347–1352 ce) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of
Europe’s population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic’s causative
agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in
medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering
new approach, ‘big data palaeoecology’, which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death’s
mortality on a regional scale across Europe. We collected pollen data on landscape change from 261 radiocarbon-dated coring
sites (lakes and wetlands) located across 19 modern-day European countries. We used two independent methods of analysis
to evaluate whether the changes we see in the landscape at the time of the Black Death agree with the hypothesis that a large
portion of the population, upwards of half, died within a few years in the 21 historical regions we studied. While we can confirm
that the Black Death had a devastating impact in some regions, we found that it had negligible or no impact in others. These
inter-regional differences in the Black Death’s mortality across Europe demonstrate the significance of cultural, ecological, economic,
societal and climatic factors that mediated the dissemination and impact of the disease. The complex interplay of these
factors, along with the historical ecology of plague, should be a focus of future research on historical pandemics.},
organization = {Max Planck Independent Research Group},
organization = {Palaeo-Science and History Group},
organization = {Estonian Research Council	PRG323	
PUT1173},
organization = {European Research Council (ERC)
European Commission	FP7 263735	
MSC 655659},
organization = {Georgetown Environmental Initiative},
organization = {Latvian Ministry of Education and Science	LZP-2020/2-0060	
LLNL-JRNL-820941},
organization = {National Science Foundation (NSF)	GSS-1228126},
organization = {Polish-Swiss Research Programme	013/2010	
086/2010},
organization = {Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland	N306 275635},
organization = {Polish National Science Centre	2019/03/X/ST10/00849	
2015/17/B/ST10/01656	
2015/17/B/ST10/03430	
2018/31/B/ST10/02498	
N N304 319636},
organization = {SCIEX	12.286},
organization = {Spanish Government	REDISCO-HAR2017-88035-P	
FPU16/00676},
organization = {Swedish Research Council},
organization = {European Commission	421-2010-1570	
2018-01272},
organization = {Volkswagen Foundation Freigeist Fellowship Dantean Anomaly},
organization = {Spanish Government	RTI2018-101714-B-I00},
organization = {OP RDE, MEYS project	CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000728},
publisher = {Springer},
title = {Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic},
doi = {10.1038/s41559-021-01652-4},
author = {Izdebski, A. and Abel Schaad, Daniel and Alba Sánchez, María Francisca},
}