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Excavation technician unearthing skeletal parts: "A sight that is rarely seen by archaeologists"
Photo: Maria Bayer / DER SPIEGEL
The archaeologists did not expect any special discoveries when they went to an area on Großweidenmühlstrasse in Nuremberg in mid-August. A retirement home should be built there. There were isolated indications in historical sources that there could be remains of a border fortification from the Thirty Years' War in the area. These should be documented before construction work begins. The researchers suspected that remnants of a former children's home that stood there in the 19th century could still be in the ground.
But the experts were wrong. They discovered not only remains of the fortress and home, but also a massive mass grave containing plague corpses from the 17th century. The team has already uncovered almost 650 skeletons, and hundreds more are likely to follow in the next few weeks. A record: Never before have so many remains of plague victims been unearthed in one place in Europe.
Kneeling between bones
Archaeologist Julian Decker, head of the excavation company “In Terra Veritas” from Bamberg, heads for a white tent on the excavation site and pushes a tarpaulin aside. It provides a view of the area that is currently being excavated. Five of his men are kneeling there or crouching on all fours, around them skulls, spines, pelvises, femurs and other skeletal remains. “It’s a sight that archaeologists rarely see,” says Decker, “one dead person comes out after another.”
In one corner, a student joining the team carefully brushes free the delicate remains of a newborn preserved in the damp soil. A colleague makes a drawing so that the location of all the dead can later be accurately reconstructed on the computer. An excavation technician frees a skull from the ground and places it in a plastic box. All bodies have small signs with numbers on them. Several of the bones are damaged - the result of the bombs that fell in the neighborhood during the Second World War and sent pressure waves through the ground. In addition, many skeletal parts are strikingly green because waste from a neighboring copper mill was also disposed of on the site.
“The find totally surprised us all,” says Melanie Langbein from Nuremberg Monument Protection. The city archives do not yet know of any documents that mention the mass grave behind the former city wall. The only clue relates to a plague hospital near the site of the discovery. However, Langbein believes that not only the dead from the hospital were buried in the area, but also corpses that were found in the city. It is known that during each wave of the plague, municipal employees pulled carts through the city collecting anyone who had died at home or on the streets.
The suppliers didn't make any particular effort at the mass grave: the dead were not buried lying flat on their backs with their hands folded in an east-west direction, as is actually customary in the Christian rite. But in the way that was right: the space had to be used as best as possible, and the corpses that were considered contagious had to disappear as quickly as possible. Children were sometimes squeezed into the gaps between adults. In one area, the experts discovered seven layers of dead bodies on top of each other. Some of the bodies were only wrapped in a cloth, others were clothed. That's why the archaeologists also found a number of buttons, hooks, eyelets and buckles that came from doublets and trousers.
The Black Death makes no exceptions
The plague struck Nuremberg many times during the Middle Ages and early modern times. After determining the age of a bone using the radiocarbon method and finding two coins from 1619 and 1621, Langbein is “pretty sure” that the mass grave dates from the wave of 1632/33. Thanks to contemporary documents such as so-called “keep chimes” books, it is easy to reconstruct how many people died. One source gives a very precise number: At that time, exactly 15,661 people in the city fell victim to the bacterium Yersinia pestis - well over a third of all residents.
The Black Death killed rich and poor, men and women, young and old. Unlike in normal cemeteries or in mass graves that were dug after battles, Langbein says, a representative cross-section of the population was encountered. There are not only old people, small children or former soldiers in the area, but people of all ages and from all backgrounds.
A detailed anthropological and archaeogenetic study of the bones and teeth could help to answer many questions about the general condition of people: What was the diet like? What physical ailments were rampant? Did people care about their teeth? “The mass grave is a huge opportunity for research,” says archaeologist Decker, “it can help us understand the lives and suffering of people in the 17th century even better