How do archaeologists connect burials with the Black Death? They combine the context of a cemetery with dating and scientific evidence. A single dramatic photograph cannot answer when someone died, what disease they encountered or how representative their experience was.
A London case study: Charterhouse Square
MOLA archaeologists uncovered burials at Charterhouse Square during Crossrail investigations in 2013. Their research report describes 25 individuals and a combination of documentary evidence, pottery, radiocarbon dating and analysis of tooth samples.
The report says ancient DNA testing identified evidence of the plague bacterium, *Yersinia pestis*. Dating placed many burials around the Black Death, but others later, including the fifteenth century. That matters: the excavation should not be described as one identical moment in every person’s life. Read MOLA’s report on the Charterhouse Square burials.
This is a particular London investigation. Its reported sample is not a count of everyone who died in the city, and it should not be converted into a mortality percentage for Europe.
Match each question to the right evidence
Use the MOLA report to build three short entries:
Context: What connects this location with an emergency burial ground? Separate evidence about the cemetery from evidence about a particular individual.
Timing: What dating methods are mentioned? Note whether the account places all burials in the same period or describes a range.
Disease: What does the report say the scientific testing found? Do not add an exact number of positive samples, a transmission route or a named person’s final symptoms unless the source actually supplies that information.
If a detail is absent from this short report, write “not specified here”. That is a useful result, not a gap to fill with an invented story.
Try an evidence-checking challenge
Below are three deliberately flawed captions. Rewrite each to make a narrower claim that you can defend from the report:
- “Every person in this cemetery died on the same day.”
- “The excavation tells us exactly how many Londoners died.”
- “The DNA result tells us what each person thought about the outbreak.”
Your revised captions need not have the same wording. Check whether each one names the evidence it uses and leaves room for what remains unknown. A strong caption can be interesting without claiming certainty about every detail.
For a second round, swap captions with another reader. Ask them to underline the part supported by the report and circle any inference that needs further research. This is an original suggested activity, not a report of a tested classroom result.
Remember the people behind the evidence
A research summary cannot recover every individual biography. If you write an imagined scene, label it historical fiction and avoid presenting invented names, emotions or dialogue as discoveries about the excavated people.
This archaeological enquiry answers a different question from what might have happened without the outbreak. For that counterfactual, continue to Black Death: population, wages and power. To compare material evidence with an official written record, read what labour records can tell us.
*Editorial review: 30 September 2026. Reworked an unpublished, overlapping counterfactual into an archaeological evidence activity. No photographs of human remains or other third-party images are reproduced.*