An interdisciplinary team of researchers has identified what may be a Black Death mass grave near the deserted medieval village of Neuses, just outside Erfurt in central Germany. By combining historical sources with geophysical survey and sediment coring, the team has located a large buried feature that appears to match descriptions of plague pits created during the epidemic of 1350.
The study, led primarily by Leipzig University, the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), was recently published in PLOS One. It offers what the researchers describe as the first systematically identified burial site in Europe associated with plague burials.
Searching for one of Erfurt’s plague pits
Study co-authors Nik Usmar (left) and Dr Michael Hein (right) carry out sediment coring to locate a medieval plague mass grave near Erfurt. Photo: Miriam Posselt
The Black Death, which spread across Europe between 1346 and 1353, killed an estimated 30 to 50 percent of the population, though the toll varied by region. In central Germany, Thuringia marked one of the easternmost areas struck by the pandemic. Medieval sources from Erfurt report that during the outbreak of 1350, about 12,000 people were buried in eleven large pits outside the city.
One of the most important written sources is the Chronicon Sampetrinum, which describes how Erfurt’s churchyards overflowed and emergency burial space had to be found beyond the walls. According to the chronicle, “eleven pits were dug […], into which around twelve thousand bodies of people were brought in wagons and carts. These were continuously transported, three or four at a time”
Despite those vivid accounts, the exact location of the graves had remained uncertain.
The researchers approached the problem by combining medieval texts, older excavation records, GIS reconstruction, electrical resistivity tomography, and sediment coring. Their work revealed a large buried structure, about 10 by 15 metres and 3.5 metres deep, filled with disturbed sediments and fragments of human bone dating to the fourteenth century.
“Our results strongly suggest that we have pinpointed one of the plague mass graves described in the Erfurt chronicles. Definitive confirmation, however, will only be possible through planned archaeological excavation,” explains Dr Michael Hein, lead author and geographer at Leipzig University.
A deliberate search, not a chance discovery
Geographical, topographic and geological overview of the study area. The position is given within (A) Central Europe, (B) the Thuringian Basin, (C) within the wide valley now partially occupied by the river Gera and (D) at the SW footslope of the hill “Roter Berg” – image courtesy PLOS One
That point is one of the most striking parts of the project. Black Death mass graves are exceptionally rare in the archaeological record, and many have been found only accidentally during modern construction work. The Erfurt case was different: the team set out to find the site through a planned interdisciplinary investigation.
“A major achievement of this study is that the find was made through an interdisciplinary prospection approach combining historical research with natural science methods – rather than through accidental discovery,” adds Dr Ulrike Werban from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ).
The journal article places the discovery in a wider European context, noting that fewer than ten excavated mass grave sites in Europe have been securely dated to the Black Death and linked to Yersinia pestis through archaeological and documentary evidence. That makes the Erfurt site especially important.
It also helps clarify a much older find. During construction of Erfurt’s first airfield in 1926–27, workers uncovered traces of the medieval settlement of Neuses, including a mass grave containing the remains of about twenty individuals stacked without clear organization and apparently buried without coffins. But the documentation was incomplete, the exact location was not securely fixed, and the human remains later disappeared, making it impossible to confirm their date or cause of death. The new study now offers a much firmer framework for understanding that earlier discovery.
The landscape of burial
The researchers also argue that the surrounding landscape played an important role in where the dead were buried. Their work identified two different soil zones near Neuses: fertile, dry chernozem soils and wetter floodplain deposits. The likely plague pit lies in the drier zone along the edge of the Gera valley, while the wetter ground seems to have been avoided.
“This finding aligns with both modern soil science and the medieval ‘miasma theory’, which held that diseases spread through ‘bad air’ and ‘vapours’ arising from decaying organic matter,” notes Dr Martin Bauch of the GWZO.
That observation helps explain why plague victims may have been buried far outside the city walls. In practical terms, wetter soils slow decomposition. In medieval thinking, damp ground and decaying matter could also be associated with unhealthy air. Legal and political considerations mattered too, but the environmental setting appears to have shaped the burial zone in important ways.
Why the discovery matters
Graphical representations of the immediate study site. Panel A – Terrain levelling for the construction of the airfield in 1926 with the hill “Roter Berg” in the background (courtesy of Thuringian State Department for the Preservation of Monuments and Archeology TLDA; photo credits: Wilhelm Lorenz 1926). Panel B – Map of the excavation findings 1926/27 (Bolle, 1937). For location, the map includes a scale (lower right = “Maßstab”) and the directional distances to the nearest roads. Panel C – Digital elevation model of the study area that displays all coring positions and the trace of all ERT-profiles included in the study – image courtesy PLOS One
The site has not yet been fully excavated, so the identification remains provisional. Even so, the evidence is strong enough to make the find highly significant. Confirmed and closely dated Black Death mass graves are very rare, and this one could provide valuable material for future anthropological and genetic analysis.
The article also stresses the broader historical importance of such sites. Mass graves are not only evidence of mortality on a huge scale; they also reveal moments when ordinary burial practices collapsed under the pressure of crisis. The authors describe them as testimony to a society overwhelmed by sudden death.
Further excavations are planned in cooperation with the Thuringian State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology. Material from the site may then be studied at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, opening the way for research into the evolution of Yersinia pestis and the social consequences of epidemic disaster.
“This discovery is not only of archaeological and historical importance,” says Professor Christoph Zielhofer, head of the Historical Anthropospheres research group at Leipzig University’s LeipzigLab. “It helps us to understand how societies deal with mass mortality – and how modern interdisciplinary science can contribute to locating mass graves, topics that remain relevant even in the 21st century.”
The article, “What the landscape can tell: An integrative stratigraphic prospection approach to localize a Black Death mass grave in Erfurt/Central Germany,” by Michael Hein, Nik Usmar, Annabell Engel, Johannes Rabiger-Völlmer, Johannes Schmidt, Matthias Silbermann, Marco Pohle, Iris Nießen, Martin Offermann, Lukas Werther, Birgit Schneider, Christian Tannhäuser, Alexander Herbig and Christoph Zielhofer, appears in PLOS One. Click here to read it.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers has identified what may be a Black Death mass grave near the deserted medieval village of Neuses, just outside Erfurt in central Germany. By combining historical sources with geophysical survey and sediment coring, the team has located a large buried feature that appears to match descriptions of plague pits created during the epidemic of 1350.
The study, led primarily by Leipzig University, the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), was recently published in PLOS One. It offers what the researchers describe as the first systematically identified burial site in Europe associated with plague burials.
Searching for one of Erfurt’s plague pits
The Black Death, which spread across Europe between 1346 and 1353, killed an estimated 30 to 50 percent of the population, though the toll varied by region. In central Germany, Thuringia marked one of the easternmost areas struck by the pandemic. Medieval sources from Erfurt report that during the outbreak of 1350, about 12,000 people were buried in eleven large pits outside the city.
One of the most important written sources is the Chronicon Sampetrinum, which describes how Erfurt’s churchyards overflowed and emergency burial space had to be found beyond the walls. According to the chronicle, “eleven pits were dug […], into which around twelve thousand bodies of people were brought in wagons and carts. These were continuously transported, three or four at a time”
Despite those vivid accounts, the exact location of the graves had remained uncertain.
The researchers approached the problem by combining medieval texts, older excavation records, GIS reconstruction, electrical resistivity tomography, and sediment coring. Their work revealed a large buried structure, about 10 by 15 metres and 3.5 metres deep, filled with disturbed sediments and fragments of human bone dating to the fourteenth century.
“Our results strongly suggest that we have pinpointed one of the plague mass graves described in the Erfurt chronicles. Definitive confirmation, however, will only be possible through planned archaeological excavation,” explains Dr Michael Hein, lead author and geographer at Leipzig University.
A deliberate search, not a chance discovery
That point is one of the most striking parts of the project. Black Death mass graves are exceptionally rare in the archaeological record, and many have been found only accidentally during modern construction work. The Erfurt case was different: the team set out to find the site through a planned interdisciplinary investigation.
“A major achievement of this study is that the find was made through an interdisciplinary prospection approach combining historical research with natural science methods – rather than through accidental discovery,” adds Dr Ulrike Werban from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ).
The journal article places the discovery in a wider European context, noting that fewer than ten excavated mass grave sites in Europe have been securely dated to the Black Death and linked to Yersinia pestis through archaeological and documentary evidence. That makes the Erfurt site especially important.
It also helps clarify a much older find. During construction of Erfurt’s first airfield in 1926–27, workers uncovered traces of the medieval settlement of Neuses, including a mass grave containing the remains of about twenty individuals stacked without clear organization and apparently buried without coffins. But the documentation was incomplete, the exact location was not securely fixed, and the human remains later disappeared, making it impossible to confirm their date or cause of death. The new study now offers a much firmer framework for understanding that earlier discovery.
The landscape of burial
The researchers also argue that the surrounding landscape played an important role in where the dead were buried. Their work identified two different soil zones near Neuses: fertile, dry chernozem soils and wetter floodplain deposits. The likely plague pit lies in the drier zone along the edge of the Gera valley, while the wetter ground seems to have been avoided.
“This finding aligns with both modern soil science and the medieval ‘miasma theory’, which held that diseases spread through ‘bad air’ and ‘vapours’ arising from decaying organic matter,” notes Dr Martin Bauch of the GWZO.
That observation helps explain why plague victims may have been buried far outside the city walls. In practical terms, wetter soils slow decomposition. In medieval thinking, damp ground and decaying matter could also be associated with unhealthy air. Legal and political considerations mattered too, but the environmental setting appears to have shaped the burial zone in important ways.
Why the discovery matters
The site has not yet been fully excavated, so the identification remains provisional. Even so, the evidence is strong enough to make the find highly significant. Confirmed and closely dated Black Death mass graves are very rare, and this one could provide valuable material for future anthropological and genetic analysis.
The article also stresses the broader historical importance of such sites. Mass graves are not only evidence of mortality on a huge scale; they also reveal moments when ordinary burial practices collapsed under the pressure of crisis. The authors describe them as testimony to a society overwhelmed by sudden death.
Further excavations are planned in cooperation with the Thuringian State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology. Material from the site may then be studied at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, opening the way for research into the evolution of Yersinia pestis and the social consequences of epidemic disaster.
“This discovery is not only of archaeological and historical importance,” says Professor Christoph Zielhofer, head of the Historical Anthropospheres research group at Leipzig University’s LeipzigLab. “It helps us to understand how societies deal with mass mortality – and how modern interdisciplinary science can contribute to locating mass graves, topics that remain relevant even in the 21st century.”
The article, “What the landscape can tell: An integrative stratigraphic prospection approach to localize a Black Death mass grave in Erfurt/Central Germany,” by Michael Hein, Nik Usmar, Annabell Engel, Johannes Rabiger-Völlmer, Johannes Schmidt, Matthias Silbermann, Marco Pohle, Iris Nießen, Martin Offermann, Lukas Werther, Birgit Schneider, Christian Tannhäuser, Alexander Herbig and Christoph Zielhofer, appears in PLOS One. Click here to read it.
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