Archaeologists discovered mass grave of plague victims in Germany

Specialists found the skeletons of about 1,000 plague victims in southern Germany, possibly the largest mass grave of this kind in Europe.

Excavations in Nuremberg ahead of the construction of new flats in the city revealed eight pits, each filled with hundreds of skeletons dating back to between the late 15^th and early 17^th centuries.

So far, three of the pits have been fully excavated, with another four expected to be investigated in the coming weeks, the archaeological company In Terra Verita has announced. Melanie Langbein from the city’s department for heritage conservation stated:

A discovery like that has never happened before and quite honestly no one had thought this to be possible. The site is of enormous importance to the city of Nuremberg and we work together in our attempt to get all information possible.

Signs of exhumation conducted after the burial of an unknown number of bodies allow to assume that more people were originally buried there.

So far, nearly 1,000 bodies have been found in the exhumed pits, documented and transported for further examination. The number is expected to rise to around 1,500 bodies. Anthropologist Florian Melzer claimed:

“The skeletons are in very good shape for examination, despite the destruction that occurred. We can now detail out all information that is kept in those bones, eg the prevalence of different kinds of cancer, genetic mutations that show in skulls, age and sex determination, status of the teeth and conclusions from that to the general health and life circumstances in this period.”

Plague killed hundreds of thousands of people in Europe between the 14^th and 18^th centuries. Previous research revealed that residents of the Nuremberg region had experienced three major and several minor outbreaks of the Black Death between the 16^th and 17^th centuries, resulting in more than 5,000 deaths in 1533, about 10,000 in 1563, and nearly 15,000 in 1634.

As far as we know the site is the biggest scientifically excavated mass burial in Germany, and with the estimated number of bodies possibly the biggest in Europe.