Plague bodies reveal secrets of the old city of London in the 14th century ++EMBARGOED++ скачать в хорошем качестве

Plague bodies reveal secrets of the old city of London in the 14th century ++EMBARGOED++

(28 Mar 2014) Almost a year after they emerged into the light, the bones of these men and women are still offering up tantalising details of the city that thrived about 800 years ago. That is until it was struck by the Black Death. The bodies were discovered at the heart of the old city by construction workers tunnelling for Crossrail, Europe's largest infrastructure project. It's a rail transport system to link east and west London. But as well as contributing to London's future, Crossrail is also parting with secrets from the past, providing archaeologists with a chance to dig down through the centuries. The 14.8 billion pound ($23 billion) railway, due to open in 2018, will run across London from west to east, with a central 13 mile (21 kilometre) section underground. That has meant tunnelling beneath some of the oldest and most densely populated sections of the city. 25 bodies were discovered within the area of the tunnel. Samples have been taken for DNA and isotope analysis in Canada and carbon dating in Northern Ireland. What they reveal is a touching story about the recently discovered Londoners. They had a varied diet, but were poor and mostly malnourished. The bones reveal the scars of a hard life, and in some cases a violent one. As a human osteologist at the Museum of London Archaeology Don Walker is used to sifting through London's ancient remains. He says: "The plague is an acute illness. Now with acute illnesses they resolve quickly, either you live, or you die and there's not enough time for the bone itself to change, to remodel. It's only with chronic diseases such as tuberculosis, which lasts a long time where the bone can remodel. However, we can tell quite a few other things from the bone such as injuries and also lifestyle. For example, in this individual, in their spine we find lesions representing signs of hard labour and in fact we find that in quite a few of the skeletons." According to Walker: "We find both in the bone and also in the stable isotope work that's been done, that they suffered from malnutrition and stress and disease during their childhood years. So that's another sign that they were perhaps quite impoverished, perhaps didn't have access to as much food as they needed." The bodies were found in a plague pit which lay just outside the ancient city walls. Local churchyards wouldn't have been able to cope with the thousands dying from the Black Death, all the bodies were interred and carefully arranged in designated burial grounds. According Jay Carver, Crossrail's architect leading the project there are thousands of bodies: "Some historical chroniclers suggest up to 50,000 (buried bodies). That's pretty unbelievable because from historian estimates the population of London in the 1340s was probably only 60,000, but historians have also extrapolated from the number of wills made that possibly up to 60% of London's population died, so we're still talking about tens of thousands." Some of the evidence archaeologists have unearthed has been remarkably detailed. Walker says: "The isotopic evidence can also tell us, tell us information about what they were eating, what kind of protein whether it's vegetable, or animal, or marine, most of them seem to have had quite a mixed diet, but we have some examples where we can say for example that some of them, they changed their diet after they moved to London because we also have information on where they were brought up due to the strontium isotopes (on the teeth) that trace the area of Britain where they were eating their food when they were developing ." Wren has sequenced the bacteria's genome. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...