The Burial Pit as Bio-historical Archive

Abstract

Recent historical research on the bubonic plague has been heavily impacted by historical biological data. Ancient DNA, the technology to trace bacteria in human remains, has turned burial grounds from places reminiscent of epidemic disasters into resourceful biohistorical archives. Mobilizing the tools of retrospective diagnostics, the burial pit has become a popular site to apply scientific methods and standards to the writing of the historical narratives of plague over the centuries. This chapter will interrogate the methodological underpinnings of the hereby intended ‘validation’ of history through science. Addressing the burial pit as a bio-historical archive allows us to critically evaluate the making of plague history and plague biology as an entangled endeavor. To this end, this chapter seeks to connect existing controversies regarding plague’s historiography to long-established debates over presentism and historical epistemology in the history of science to argue for a renewed understanding of biohistory.

The original version of this chapter was revised: Author provided funding information has been added. The erratum to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62929-2_10