A team of researchers from the United States has confirmed the existence of the first mass grave in the Mediterranean associated with the earliest recorded pandemic. This discovery sheds new light on the Justinian Plague, which devastated the Byzantine Empire, claiming millions of lives between the 6th and 8th centuries.

As detailed in the February edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science, the study provides a unique empirical perspective on the movement, urban lifestyle, and susceptibility of those affected by the pandemic.

DNA analysis from bodies found at a mass burial site in Jerash, located in present-day Jordan, suggests that these remains are the result of a “single mortuary event.” This contrasts with the typical, gradual accumulation of bodies in standard cemeteries. Researchers had previously identified Yersinia pestis as the bacterium responsible for the plague.

The study delved into the lives of the victims, exploring their vulnerability to the disease and their reasons for being in Jerash—a bustling trade center and epicenter of the pandemic from AD 541 to AD 750.

“Previous studies pinpointed the plague-causing organism. The Jerash site transforms that genetic evidence into a narrative of human loss and how a city coped with catastrophe,” explained Rays Jiang, the study’s lead author and an associate professor at the University of South Florida’s Department of Global, Environmental, and Genomic Health Sciences.

“Pandemics are not solely biological phenomena; they are also societal events. By connecting biological data from the remains with their archaeological surroundings, we can understand how the disease impacted individuals within their social and environmental landscapes.”

“This helps us understand pandemics in history as lived human health events, not just outbreaks recorded in text.”

A multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, historians and genetic experts from the University of South Florida, Florida Atlantic University and the University of Sydney produced the paper, with Jiang and her researchers looking at DNA extracted from teeth.

They found that a diverse demographic range of victims, which she said showed that a largely mobile population was together and effectively stuck in the same place by the disease, similar to how travel shut down during the Covid pandemic.

“People move. They’re transient, and vulnerable, and normally they are disturbed, dispersed. Here, they were brought together by crisis,” Jiang said, adding that ancient pandemics thrived in densely populated cities shaped by travel and environmental change.

Excavations revealed more than 200 people were buried in the grave at the hippodrome in Jerash, known as the Pompeii of the Middle East for its preserved Greco-Roman ruins. Jiang said they were a mix of men and women, old and young, “people in their prime, and teenagers”.

“At that time there were slaves, mercenaries, all sorts of people, and our data is consistent with this being a transient population. That’s not a new thing,” she continued.

Jiang said the research exposed other parallels in more modern pandemics, particularly Covid, dismissed by Donald Trump in its early days as “a hoax”.

“There’s a whole school of thought that says the first pandemic did not happen,” she said. “The denialists argue that if you look at census data, the population did not collapse like the Black Death, if you look at economic tracking, you don’t see anything, if you study residence density maps you don’t see a disruption. And plus, no one had found a mass grave.

“But the first plague is actually much easier to untangle than Covid. We have Yersinia pestis as the microbe; we have a mass grave, and bodies, hard evidence that it happened. Whether society or institutions collapsed is a separate matter. You can have a disease rampage through and don’t have to have a revolution, a revolt, a regime change to prove that it did.”