Abstract
Archaeological excavations carried out over the last few decades on funerary sites that were part or all part of epidemic contexts have led to the creation of a large corpus of documentation relating to the Black Death and its resurgences.
Today, with some fifty sites spread across Europe, it provides an invaluable substratum for the study of various characteristics of these epidemics, some of which are poorly documented in historical sources. Recent bioarchaeological research has taken advantage of these soil archives to reconstruct, in detail, the funeral treatment methods adopted in these contexts of extraordinary mortality, thereby revealing their diversity, some of their territorial specificities and, even more, the evolution they underwent during the second plague pandemic.
At the same time, analysis of the skeletons exhumed from these sites has recently enabled us to reconstruct certain epidemiological characteristics of the disease, based on the paleobiological data collected. In the light of the most recent studies, the disease does not appear to have generally caused differential mortality according to the age, sex or pre-existing state of health of the individuals exposed to it.
However, chrono-geographical variations suggest the potential influence of other intrinsic (e.g. genetic inheritance, nutritional status) or extrinsic (e.g. social status, nature of ectoparasites carrying the disease) risk factors, which are the focus of new research currently being deployed.
