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Matters Arising to this article was published on 05 September We collected pollen data on landscape change from 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.
The complex interplay of these factors, along with the historical ecology of plague, should be a focus of future research on historical pandemics. Few doubt that the mid-fourteenth-century Afro-Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, killed tens of millions of people. Whole-genome sequencing confirms the pandemic as a novel introduction of the zoonotic bacterium Yersinia pestis 5 , 6.
Here we pioneer a new approach, big data palaeoecology BDP , that leverages the field of palynology to evaluate the demographic impact of the Black Death on a regional scale across Europe, independent of written sources and traditional archaeological material. Our analysis of 1, pollen samples from sites, reflecting landscape change and agricultural activities, demonstrates Black Death mortality was far more spatially heterogeneous than previously recognized.
