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Amid excavations preceding the construction of a retirement home at Germany’s Nuremberg, archaeologists have made a significant discovery and found over 1,500 skeletons of plague victims in mass graves, reported CNN.
This is likely to be the largest mass burial of plague victims ever found in Europe.
Melanie Langbein, from Nuremberg’s Department for heritage conservation, said, as quoted by CNN, that around plague pits were identified and each contained several hundred bodies.
Though precise dating is pending, initial details claim that the eight plague pits were established around the first half of the 17th century.
To a surprise, even a few bones show a green tint, maybe because the site was used to dispose of waste from a nearby copper mill.
“Those people were not interred in a regular cemetery although we have designated plague cemeteries in Nuremberg,” CNN quoted Langbein as saying.
“This means a large number of dead people who needed to be buried in a short time frame without regard to Christian burial practices,” she said.
According to Langbein, Nuremberg suffered plague outbreaks roughly every 10 years from the 14th century onward. Due to this, it is a challenge for them to date the remains.
They used radiocarbon dating to date one mass grave, and found out that the older group of remains probably dates from the 1632-1633 epidemic, said the report. They even presume almost 2,000 people were buried near St. Sebastian Spital — which is the site of the current excavation.
More to come…
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Published: 12 Mar 2024, 05:40 PM IST
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