Tracking mass death during the fall of Rome's empire (II): a first inventory of mass graves

Abstract

Part I of this study synthesized what archaeological features and written evidence indicate about human mortality crises during the later Roman Empire. It argued that one could test competing ideas about mortality crises by assembling and analyzing the archaeological evidence of mass graves of our Type 1, defined as the resting place of more than 5 individuals who were interred more or less simultaneously. Such an archaeological data-set would clarify whether mass death figured significantly in the demographic and cultural landscape of late antiquity. It should, moreover, begin to elucidate when, where, and to what varying extent mortality crises may have been induced by violence, disease, or economic and environmental conditions. Part I reviewed the aggregate patterns of 85 archaeological features in 55 sites. Ten were very large burials (50-526 individuals); burials of between 5 and 9 individuals were most frequent (31 cases). Very large graves were predominantly urban, although large military burials occurred in the countryside. Eyewitnesses described huge mass graves in some of the empire's great cities, but few have been archaeologically documented until now. Nonetheless, the late Roman city that has been most carefully investigated, Jerusalem, has yielded 8 such sites. A third (10) of 29 burials that provide useful evidence document violent death. Although the dating of many features is imperfect, mass graves identified so far peaked in the 6th (24) and 7th (32) c.