ice cores

The Past

This week: climate change

Archaeologists have been among those paying close attention this week as delegates have gathered in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26. Few would now disagree that man-made global warming is having a devastating effect around the world.

Above Side by side in a pit, these skeletons were originally assumed to be Black Death victims, but radiocarbon dates have provided an unexpected explanation for the high fatality rate. Could they have died as a result of the last millennium’s largest volcanic eruption? This mass burial clips the edge of an earlier pit that may date to a 1252 famine, while the bodies in the later pit are believed to be victims of the climatic fluctuation brought on by the 1258 eruption.

Current Archaeology
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London’s volcanic winter: Spitalfields cemetery and the famine of 1258

Mass graves were needed all too often in the Medieval world, but establishing the specific tragedy behind any given set is difficult. Now Don Walker believes that a group in Spitalfields cemetery can be linked to a massive volcanic eruption, as he told Matthew Symonds.