












































Bioarchaeology International
Volume 7, Number 4: 307–327
DOI: 10.5744/bi.2022.0034

Copyright © 2023 University of Florida Press

Race, Population Affinity, and Mortality  
Risk during the Second Plague Pandemic  
in Fourteenth- Century London, England
Rebecca Redfern,a,b* Sharon N. DeWitte,c Joseph T. Hefner,d and  
Dorothy Kime

aMuseum of London, London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
bSchool of History, Classics, and Archaeology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom 
of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

cInstitute of Behavioral Science and Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, 
CO, USA

dDepartment of Anthropology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
eEnglish, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA
* Correspondence to: Rebecca Redfern, Museum of London, Centre for Human Bioarchaeology, 150 London 
Wall, London EC2Y 5HN, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 

E- mail: rredfern@museumoflondon . org . uk

ABSTRACT We investigate whether hazards of death from plague and physiological stress at a fourteenth- century plague 
cemetery (Royal Mint, London) differed between populations using N = 49 adults whose affiliation was estab-
lished using macromorphoscopic traits. Compared to a nonplague cemetery (N = 96), there was a greater pro-
portion of people of estimated African affiliation in the plague burials. Cox proportional hazards analysis revealed 
higher hazards of death from plague for those with estimated African affiliation. There were higher rates of lin-
ear enamel hypoplasia in those with estimated African affiliation, but this finding is not statistically significant. 
These results provide the first evidence that hazards of plague death were higher for people of estimated African 
affiliation compared to other affiliations, possibly because of existing inequalities, in addition to migration (free 
or forced) outcomes. These findings may reflect premodern structural racism’s devastating effects.

Keywords: Second Plague Pandemic; mortality risk; population affiliation

 Investigamos si los riesgos de la muerte resultando de la peste y estrés fisiológico en un cementerio de la peste 
del siglo XIV (Royal Mint, Londres) son diferente entre poblaciones de adultos (N = 49) quienes afiliación estu-
vieron establecido utilizando rasgos macromorfoscópicos. En comparación con un cementerio no asociado con 
la peste (N = 96), había una proporción más grande de gente estimado tener afiliación africana en los entierros 
asociados con la peste. Análisis de riesgos proporcional de Cox indicaron que había un riesgo de muerte de la 
plaga más alto por individuos estimados tener afiliación africana. Había índices más grandes de hipoplasia de 
esmalte dental en individuos de afiliación africana, pero el nivel estadístico no fue significativo. Los resultados 
demuestran la primera evidencia que los riesgos de la muerte de la peste fueron más altos por gente de afiliación 
africana en comparación a otras afinidades, posiblemente como resultado de disparidades sociales en combi-
nación con los efectos de migración (libre o forzada). Los resultados se pueden reflejar las consecuencias devas-
tadoras del racismo estructural premoderno.

Palabras claves: Segunda Pandemia de la Plaga; riesgo de mortalidad; affiliacion poblacional

Received 19 November 2022
Revised 29 April 2023

Accepted 19 August 2023



Population Affinity and Plague in Fourteenth-Century London308

The Second Plague Pandemic’s (SPP) first outbreak 
in the mid- fourteenth century A.D., commonly referred 
to as the Black Death, killed many millions of people 
across Eurasia and Africa and was one of the most cat-
astrophic disease events the world has ever experi-
enced (Ziegler 2016). The SPP continued in the form 
of outbreaks and isolated cases of plague for centuries 
afterward. Paleogenetic analysis of human remains 
from across Europe and Asia has established that the 
SPP was caused by Yersina pestis, the bacterium that 
continues to cause plague globally (Bos et  al. 2011, 
2012; Gourvennec 2019; Haensch et  al. 2010; Kacki 
et al. 2011; Keller et al. 2019; Schuenemann et al. 2011; 
Spyrou et al. 2016, 2019, 2022; Willmott et al. 2020). 
Extensive land and sea trade networks promoted the 
rapid spread of the initial wave of the SPP (Byrne 2012; 
Ziegler 2016); some modeling suggests the disease 
traveled between 1.5 and 6 km a day (Christakos et al. 
2005). Through dramatic depopulation, the fourteenth- 
century plague also wrought significant political and 
economic changes across Europe (Horrox 1994), and it 
resulted in many violent acts against minority groups, 
including the racial- religious cleansing of Jewish com-
munities (Colet et al. 2016; Nirenberg 2015; Rambaran- 
Olm 2020). The pandemic led to increased tensions 
between different communities, status groups, and 
religions, although these detrimental divisions and 
structural inequalities (i.e., racism) already existed 
and had been rising for many years, in part due to the 
Little Ice Age’s (1300– 1870 A.D.) successive waves of 
famine and climatic instability (Fagan 2000; Hahn 
2001; Heng 2018a; Ziegler 2016). Consequently, the 
pandemic affected countries whose populations were 
already compromised, as evidenced by the study of 
medieval human remains from across Europe (De-
Witte 2015; Gamble et al. 2017; Scott and Hoppa 2019; 
Yaussy et al. 2016, 2018).

Despite some medieval primary sources suggesting 
the first wave of the SPP killed almost everyone it in-
fected (Cohn 2008), bio archae ol o gi cal research has 
provided evidence that, in at least some contexts, it 
was not an indiscriminate killer. For example, in Lon-
don, individuals with evidence of physiological stress-
ors experienced prior to the epidemic, including those 
associated with developmental disruption during 
childhood, were more likely to die during the 1348– 1350 
A.D. outbreak compared to age- peers without evidence 
of such previous exposure to stress (DeWitte 2009, 
2010a, 2010b, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2014d; DeWitte and 
Hughes- Morey 2012; DeWitte and Wood 2008; Godde 
et  al. 2020). Analysis of individuals who died in a 
plague in the latter half of the fourteenth century, 
likely the 1361 A.D. plague, which killed an estimated 
10% to 30% of the English population, indicates a rel-
atively high hazard of dying for individuals who were 

frail because of previous exposure to physiological 
stressors and those who were nutritionally compro-
mised (DeWitte and Kowaleski 2017; DeWitte and 
Wissler 2022). Bio archae ol o gi cal research on the SPP 
has not yielded evidence of sex difference in plague 
mortality (Castex and Kacki 2016; DeWitte 2009). 
However, evidence from historical documents indicates 
a sex- selective effect (i.e., higher numbers of female 
deaths compared to nonplague years) during SPP 
outbreaks up through 1450 A.D. in the Netherlands 
(Curtis and Roosen 2017). Historical documents also 
yield evidence that mortality during the SPP was 
worse for poorer people than for the wealthy in some 
contexts (Alfani and Bonetti 2019; Cummins et al. 
2016; DeWitte and Kowaleski 2017; Galanaud et al. 
2020). In this way, the SPP documentary evidence re-
veals how gender and class categories (structural 
inequality) compound harm in populations. Re-
search on premodern SPP in Sub- Saharan Africa 
has also revealed a substantial effect on populations 
and communities, especially in late medieval West 
Africa (Chouin 2018a, 2018b; Green 2018; see also 
Gomez 2020).

There is thus existing evidence that medieval 
plague mortality risks varied along both biopolitical 
and sociocultural dimensions. However, to date, 
no bio archae ol o gi cal research has addressed the po-
tential effects of structural racism, despite primary 
source evidence showing that northern Europe had a 
diverse and racialized population during this period 
(Heng 2018a; Ray 2007; Williamson 2014). To further 
clarify the ways in which biosocial factors affected 
risks of mortality during the SPP, our study is the 
first to combine osteological evidence for population 
affiliation with skeletal data on sex, age- at- death, 
and physiological stress in human remains exca-
vated from a London, fourteenth- century, SPP burial 
ground. We test the hypothesis that people who 
would have been identified as belonging to popula-
tion affiliations other than white European and 
specifically connected to an African geographical 
affiliation, and who were therefore potentially racial-
ized as Black in life or suffered the stressors associ-
ated with anti- Blackness, migration (forced or 
otherwise), and unfreedoms (at demise or over a life-
time), faced higher risks of death compared to white 
Europeans during the SPP. This is a premodern ex-
ample of current discussions concerning race and 
COVID– 19 (Columbia University 2020; Ogedegbe 
et al. 2020). There were other groups in premodern 
England’s racialized landscape, including the Welsh, 
Irish, Jews, and Muslims. In future population dis-
cussions, we can examine the compounded harm via 
intersectionality of Black Jews and Black Muslims— 
although this cannot be confirmed for medieval 



Redfern et al. 309

English Jewish cemeteries, because those human 
remains are reburied, often immediately after exca-
vation (e.g., Historic England 2020; The Jewish 
Chronicle 2019; see also Belcastro and Mariotti 2021; 
Colomer 2014; Gleize et al. 2016). Currently, because 
our sites were Christian burial grounds, they do not 
yield any evidence for Black Muslims, although 
their presence may have been erased through being 
given a Christian burial treatment. Nevertheless, 
one can consider the further compounded harm of 
intersectionality in relation to anti- Blackness and 
racio- religious structural racism in these cases in 
future examinations of Muslim grave sites. Our arti-
cle  focuses on anti- Black structural racism within 
Christian cemeteries, racial capitalism’s earlier gene-
alogies, and medieval London as a location to high-
light how a substantial community can be erased 
from history.

Autoethnography and Our Situatedness

An article about medieval bioarchaeology that dis-
cusses race, racism, pre- 1500 A.D. medieval England, 
an earlier genealogy related to transatlantic chattel 
slavery, the archive of slavery, and a global pandem-
ic’s effect on racialized populations of varied states of 
unfreedom requires a self- reflexive, critical analysis 
of its methodologies and commitments, especially as 
the concurrent pandemics of COVID- 19 and global 
anti- Blackness devastate racialized communities in 
the 2020s. Black Lives Matter. Black Methodologies 
Matter.

A discussion of decolonization and Black feminist 
theoretical praxis often begins with an autoethnogra-
phy (Brown- Vincent 2019; Franklin 2001; Tuhiwai 
Smith 2022). This has been advocated as a necessary 
component in an antiracist, Black feminist, and decol-
onized approach to historical bioarchaeology (see 
Watkins 2020:19).

We are keenly aware of the twinned whiteness of 
both anthropology and medieval studies. This double- 
whiteness has also meant a lack of Black researchers 
and “knowledge producers” in our fields. We hope 
to prioritize the methodologies of Black feminist ar-
chaeology and the interdisciplinary work we bring 
to bear on this archive (Watkins 2020:14). In addi-
tion, following “Archaeologies of the Heart,” we 
emphasize our commitment “to position . . .  work 
consciously and to practice a rigorous self- reflexivity 
in its conduct” (Supernant et al. 2021:6). We believe 
that our work is about “generating multiple perspec-
tives on truth” (Supernant et  al. 2021:7), especially 
how our interdisciplinary work crosses academic si-
los, enabling a “pluralistic approach” to a myriad of 

historical truths and methodological discoveries 
(Supernant et al. 2021:7).

Materials and Methods

Medieval London: people and plague

London provides an ideal context to examine struc-
tural racism’s possible effects on risk of death during 
the SPP for two reasons: it contained a heterogenous 
population mix, and archaeological excavations have 
yielded skeletal samples with incredible chronological 
control, enabling a study of a relatively large sample 
of people known to have died during SPP (Grainger 
et al. 2008; Pfizenmaier 2016). London, medieval En-
gland’s most important urban center, was home to the 
country’s most powerful political, economic, and re-
ligious institutions. Connected to the world by its river 
port, which brought goods and people directly into 
fourteenth- century London, it was home to an esti-
mated 80,000 people (Barron et  al. 2017; Thrupp 
1989). Primary source examination, from 1336– 1584 
A.D., reveal nearly 18,000 “foreigners” had come to 
London from India, Greece, Iceland, and mainland 
Europe (i.e., Italy) (Lutkin 2016); note that information 
about appearance (i.e., skin color) was not recorded in 
the source material. The majority were temporary res-
idents, but mercantile and richer migrants stayed for 
several years and sometimes were accompanied by 
their entire households, which included free and 
enslaved servants and illegitimate children (Laufen-
berg 2016; Lutkin 2016; Thrupp 1957, 1989). Many 
enslaved people were forced into bondage in Italian 
and southern Spanish markets and originated from 
Sub- Saharan and northern Africa or Eastern Europe 
(Guidi- Bruscoli 2016; Hernæs and Iversen 2002; Miller 
2002; Phillips 1985, 2013). The primary source and 
bio archae ol o gi cal evidence reveal that several popu-
lation affiliation groups and mixed- race people lived 
in London, some of whom who had spent their early 
childhood in Britain, suggesting that they were (at 
least) second- generation migrants (Kendall et  al. 
2013; Redfern and Hefner 2019; Richard of Devizes 
1192).

Before the plague reached England in 1348 A.D., ex-
tensive preparations had been made to cope with the 
epidemic. This included the creation of two emergency 
burial grounds— East Smithfield (close to the Tower of 
London) and West Smithfield, positioned further 
north in the city (Grainger et al. 2008; Pfizenmaier 
2016). The plague reached London in fall 1348, result-
ing in 60% of the city’s population dying, until it 
waned in 1351 A.D. (Byrne 2012; Horrox 1994; Sloane 
2011). Sloane (2011) has shown that the city’s parish 



Population Affinity and Plague in Fourteenth-Century London310

cemeteries (numbering over 100) buried the majority 
of plague victims. However, these cemeteries mostly 
have not been divided into pre-  or postplague phases, 
meaning that the emergency burial ground popula-
tions remain unique.

Medieval London: race, anti- Blackness, and 
medieval England

This article includes data and tools that have been 
rightly critiqued for their role in perpetuating systemic 
racism, specifically the use of macromorphoscopic 
traits (Bethard and DiGangi 2020; contra. Stull et  al. 
2021). We acknowledge that any methodological over-
haul and/or new theorized praxis is a process and that 
whiteness must be decentered to achieve this. As two 
white anthropologists, a white bioarchaeologist, and 
one woman of color medievalist, we must de- center our 
work. We choose to foreground contexts and complex-
ities, as well as white supremacist genealogies in  forensic 
anthropology and medieval studies, as a form of meth-
odological praxis as process. In light of critique, we 
used five traits with known heritability: anterior  nasal 
spine, interorbital breadth, nasal aperture width, infe-
rior nasal aperture, and nasal bone contour (Plemons 
2022).

Black feminist praxis and recent antiracist work 
that utilizes historical context to analyze a site informs 
our research (Barnes 2021). As Cho and colleagues 
(2021) advocate, we use the terms population affinity 
and mixed race, mindful that “racism is a social real-
ity that can affect biology” (Cho et al. 2021). We also 
acknowledge the contextual nuances and specific de-
tails that must be discussed when working in race and 
science. As presented in Kim and Coles (2021:4– 12), we 
understand that structural racism is built into science 
and agree that studies of the past must be specific to 
their temporality and location.

In this section, we contextualize the distinct speci-
ficities of time, geography, and conditions in relation 
to medieval England and race that is different from 
other European geographies. Despite scholars docu-
menting the multiracial scene in early modern Lon-
don (Habib 2008; Hall 1995) or more recently on an 
early modern English ship (Scorrer et al. 2021), the im-
age of a white medieval England persists. This white 
nostalgia is rooted in the same white supremacist 
ideology that has fed contemporary violence. Like-
wise, medieval studies scholarship has boosted this 
“preracial” version of the premodern past that has al-
lowed medieval cultures, societies, writers, and pow-
erbrokers to hide behind “white innocence,” when 
the truth is that race (structural racism) was invented, 
refined, and rehearsed in medieval England (Kim 
2021).

Heng (2018a:3) explains that medieval race is “a 
structural relationship for the articulation and man-
agement of human differences, rather than substantive 
content . . .  [with] religion— the paramount source of 
authority in the medieval period— could . . .  for in-
stance, [subject ‘detested’ people] to a political theol-
ogy that could biologize, define, and essentialize an 
entire community as fundamentally and absolutely 
different.” Our definition of race centers the Black fem-
inist material turn (biopolitical and sociocultural)— 
dependent on location and temporality (Spillers 1987, 
2003; Weheliye 2014). Although many historians have 
argued that using “race” to describe the medieval phe-
nomena of structural racism is anachronistic, others 
in premodern critical race studies, as well as critical 
race theorists, have in the past several decades made 
it emphatically clear that the term to use is race rather 
than anything else (Heng 2021; Kim 2021; Mills 2020; 
among others).

Later medieval England (c. 1100– 1500 A.D.) inher-
ited, through its written and spoken culture, narratives 
of a racialized hierarchy connected to geographic 
space and climate, ideas that can be traced back to Hip-
pocrates (Kennedy et al. 2013:35– 41). Although Hip-
pocratic work was not in circulation, its vision of a 
geographic/climatological organization of racial hier-
archy is present in cartography (e.g., the Hereford 
Map, 1300 A.D.), which centers and gives more room 
to European places and territories. Medieval English 
white Christianity based its racialization on “popula-
tion affinity” connected to organizing people by 
 climatological/geographic racial difference, meaning 
that medieval English anti- Blackness included epider-
mal racialization (Heng 2018a:180– 256; Whitaker 2019).

England had already begun practicing how to 
 organize, categorize, and hierarchize nonhegemonic 
white Christian groups because it was an early racial 
state (Heng 2018a, 2018b). The English state, as part of 
a larger colonial project in the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries, also racialized the Welsh and Irish in the 
British Isles, and Muslims in its Eastern Mediterra-
nean crusader colony (Acre, lost in 1291 A.D.), using 
many of the same Orientalist tropes flung at both real 
and imagined Islamic foes (Heng 2018a; Lumbley 2019; 
Rajabzadeh 2019). Structural racism had different ter-
rains and archives for different groups. In the case of 
the English racio- religious Jewish and Islamic differ-
ence, we can identify their populations by how they 
were buried in grave sites and, for the pre- 1290 Jewish 
community in England, a small Anglo- Hebrew doc-
umentary archive (Olszowy- Schlanger 2015). For the 
Welsh and Irish who the English colonized in the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we have substantial 
documentary archives of how the subaltern racialized 
populations spoke back to English colonial hegemony.



Redfern et al. 311

In contrast, Black people did not have emic docu-
mentation or viewpoints from which we hear directly 
about their lives or racial formations, or else the docu-
mentation has been completely whitewashed, because 
the white imaginary defined medieval England as a 
white population space. Concomitantly, hundreds of 
archives were destroyed during the Dissolution (1536– 
1540 A.D.) (Kim 2022), and medieval scholarship has 
deliberately whitewashed the presence of Black people 
in archives. We have two examples: one methodologi-
cal and one documentary (from the medieval English 
literary canon) that demonstrate the consequences for 
the documentary and archaeological record.

Across Britain and Europe, the majority of osteo-
archaeological professional recording standards do 
not record population affiliation or ancestry (e.g., Rose 
et  al. 1991), due to a combination of factors: it was 
only recently being introduced in British standards 
(created 2004) in 2017 (Mitchell and Brickley 2017), not 
all bioarchaeology/human osteology/paleopathology 
courses teach these methods, and many archaeo-
logical contractors have not revised their standards 
for over a decade. Consequently, the white imaginary, 
which assumes a de facto white population, is used as 
the “empirical” evidence for a population discussion 
of all medieval European human remains, especially 
burial grounds (contra. Redfern and Hefner 2019, 
2021; Our Migration Story n.d.; York Archaeology 
2019). Therefore, the paucity of population affiliation 
data means that there is no “empirical” evidence for a 
white- only population in medieval England. Instead, 
immense work must be done to debunk the white su-
premacist scholarly and methodological structures 
that have upheld and kept the white racial imaginary 
in place for centuries and is central to white medie-
val “heritage politics” in contemporary far- right poli-
tics (Christmas 2019).

This has affected our analysis of the English docu-
mentary record. It is also a record in white scholarly 
methodologies, ontologies, and whitewashing. The 
white imaginary has trained scholars to skip over what 
is so plain to see. The work of fourteenth- century Lon-
don poet Geoffrey Chaucer has been the subject of 
scholarship for centuries, and his Canterbury Tales 
has been a British colonial school text (Viswanathan 
2014). Yet, only recently has race been discussed with 
respect to Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale. This tale, which de-
scribes an apprentice cook’s (named Perkyn Rev-
elour) London life, involves gambling, sex workers, 
and occasional prison stints. Revelour is physically 
described as: “Broun as a berye, a propre short felwe/ 
With lokkes blake ykembd ful fetisly” (Brown as a 
berry, a proper short fellow/ With black locks combed 
elegantly) (San Marino, Huntington Library MS Elles-
mere 26 C9, f. 46v– 47v). Hsy (2021:380) is the first to 

discuss Revelour in relation to race— “a racialized 
brownness”— using the potential of “racial specula-
tion.” The white gaze is so embedded that scholars see 
the darker skin in the Ellesmere manuscript’s Cook’s 
portrait as evidence of disease or low social class 
(Sweany 2018). There are over three dozen medieval 
English manuscripts that attest to the Black Cook. This 
is an example of a specific documentary archive in 
which all scholarship has skipped over the Cook as a 
Black servant in fourteenth- century London. Earlier 
Chaucer and race scholars had to temper their argu-
ments, because the “empirical” population evidence 
upheld the white racial imaginary of a white medie-
val England (Hsy 2021; Whitaker 2019). Recording 
population affiliation would have a cascading and seis-
mic effect in scholarship, prompting a reassessment 
of medieval European primary sources. Osteological 
data will allow medieval scholars to say that these 
Black men, women, and children, who have been re-
corded, are not a fantasy or just possibilities. Such data 
also would reveal an earlier start to England’s adop-
tion and practice of racialized unfreedoms (Fuentes 
and Rouse 2016; Morgan 2021; Otelle 2021).

Although medieval England’s race technology was 
mutable, biopolitical, and sociocultural, English white 
Christian hegemony saw racial difference as im-
mutable and in the blood. Anyone who was marked 
visually or embodied as originating outside of Europe, 
particularly if they fitted a “Black Ethiopian” descrip-
tion, would have been racialized. We identify “mixed- 
race” people as racialized based on what critical race 
legal theorists would identify as miscegenation laws 
appearing in the Fourth Lateran Council’s Canon 68 
(1215 A.D.). This ruling specifically forbade Christians 
from forming sexual relationships with Jews or Mus-
lims due to concerns about mixed- race/religious chil-
dren (Harris 1993:1739– 1740; Heng 2018a:76– 77).

Black feminist methodology

The Royal Mint site, in relation to the effects of pan-
demic disease and population affiliations, offers us an 
insight into medieval racial necropolitics and struc-
tural violence. As can be seen in COVID- 19 pandemic 
data, there is a clear correlation between structural 
violence, particularly as it pertains to race, and dis-
proportionately higher rates of mortality among 
Global Majority communities (Flagg et al. 2020).

The effects of structural racism can be found in ar-
chaeological data and health disparities observed in 
human remains (Nystrom 2014:756– 766). To do justice 
to the human remains in our study, we foreground the 
work of Black feminist archaeology. Battle- Baptiste 
(2016:70) suggests this “takes into account the dis-
advantage of how these aspects of identity (primarily 



Population Affinity and Plague in Fourteenth-Century London312

race and gender) act as a doubled (and with class a 
triple) form of oppression” (see Franklin 2001:115– 116). 
This sits alongside the work of Hill Collins (2019), Cren-
shaw (1991, 1989), and the Combahee River Collective 
(Taylor 2017) about intersectionality. We follow Hart-
man’s (1997, 2007) work on the archive of slavery and 
McKittrick (2006, 2014, 2015) on Black geography to 
center Black feminist archive and data methodologies. 
Although much work done in Black feminist archaeol-
ogy focuses on North American post- 1492 A.D. sites, we 
apply these methods to London’s fourteenth- century 
cityscape.

The Royal Mint site also reorients our understand-
ing of the transatlantic chattel slavery archive’s begin-
nings. Likewise, the discussion of structural racism 
and pandemic necropolitics (Mbembé and Meintjes 
2003) remains an ongoing lens of analysis. We bring 
these multidisciplinary strands together in order to, in 
Battle- Baptiste’s (2016:67) words, “create a purpose-
fully coarse and textured analytical framework.”

Our framework pulls from Black feminist work in 
the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. We con-
textualize the Royal Mint site as part of the archive of 
slavery, as well as what Wynter (1990) and McKittrick 
(2006) theorize as “demonic grounds,” and to see me-
dieval London as a Black diaspora geography: “de-
monic grounds . . . are not simply identifying categories 
of difference, absence, and the places and voices of 
black women and/or black feminism; they also outline 
the ways in which this place is an unfinished and there-
fore transformative human geography story” (Mc-
Kittrick 2006:xxvi). Hartman (2008:2) remarks upon the 
“act of chance or disaster” that allowed us to even have 
a sentence, a phrase to mark Black women’s presence in 
the archival records, when the standard encounter with 
the archive is silence, erasure, and “invisibility.”

Given that a percentage of those killed by London 
plague epidemics were enslaved or formerly enslaved 
people, our Black feminist archaeology must first ad-
dress the archive of slavery. Our archive, their remains, 
are precisely what Hartman (2008:2) characterizes as 
a “death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated 
body, an inventory of property.” We are reckoning 
with the impossibility of discussing premodern Black 
lives in any way that is not about pain and death. Their 
remains, “the violence that deposited these traces in 
the archive” (Hartman 2008:2), are our evidence and 
data points. This is why we must think through Black 
feminist archaeology to consider other ways to tell 
these narratives.

McKittrick (2014:17) addresses the archive of slav-
ery, Black men and women as data, by calling atten-
tion to “the mathematics of the unliving.” What 
McKittrick (2014:16) underlines is that these bodies 
(our osteological data) become an “object- commodity” 

in which there is no way to give life or to tell these sto-
ries. “If the source of blackness is death and violence,” 
they argue, “the citation of blackness— the scholarly 
stories we tell— calls for the repetition of death and 
 violence. . . .  Put differently, historically present anti- 
black violence is repaired by reproducing knowledge 
about the black subjects that renders them less than 
human” (McKittrick 2014:17– 18). This is the method-
ological knot we must unravel.

Hartman (2008:11) argues for a methodological shift 
to address this issue: what they call “critical fabula-
tion.” The purpose here is not “to give voice to the slave, 
but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm 
of experience which is situated between two zones of 
death— social and corporeal” (Hartman 2008:12, 2019). 
McKittrick (2014:25) argues that Black studies is the 
method to work successfully on demonic grounds pre-
cisely “because the mathematics of blackness and 
white supremacy are seemingly knowable (because ac-
countable and counted) and always laden with a cha-
otic uncertainty.” Developing that concept, Flewellen 
(2017:73) proposes that “demonic grounds then be-
come spaces that literally create new conceptualiza-
tions of being, a possessed form of being that cannot 
be knowable, yet act as a fruitful space for exploration 
and knowledge production, there by re- presenting hu-
man geography.” Designating fourteenth- century 
London as a demonic ground allows us to reexamine 
our data to address these different possibilities.

The pandemic burial grounds are a form of Black 
spatial geography and especially a matter of Black di-
aspora. As Watkins (2020:20) explains, the works of 
Black feminist biopolitics and race “discuss racializ-
ing assemblages as key vehicles through which biocen-
tricity is reinforced” and “involve[s] sociopolitical 
processes that discipline humanity into categories, 
such as human, not quite human, and nonhuman.” Our 
approach aligns with this critical race genealogy: the 
biopolitical that thinks through racialized assemblages.

Lastly, Black feminist methodology asks that this 
work be a collaboration with a community of stake-
holders as a form of social justice and an extension 
of Black feminist autoethnography. Watkins (2020:23) 
builds on the three- pillar structure advocated by 
Blakey (1991): (1) that “scientific investigation is not an 
objective or passive practice”; (2) that “decolonized 
study of human biology should readily contribute to 
broader, interdisciplinary investigations of human 
conditions and disparities”; and (3) “the explicit rec-
ognition of human responsibility in the production of 
scientific knowledge.” We plan to bring these methods 
into our future work. There are no UK projects similar 
to Blakey’s (2020) work at the New York African Burial 
Ground, as medieval and later burial grounds were not 
separated by race but rather by religious tradition, and 



Redfern et al. 313

archaeological contractors do not consistently record 
or report population affiliation data (see Redfern and 
Hefner 2019). But we agree with Franklin et al. (2020) 
that related communities must be collaborators and 
partners in archaeological practice. We intend to keep 
accountable to these larger methodological goals— we 
believe the recent work of Finding Ceremony (https:// 
www . findingceremony . com/) is an excellent example 
of descendant  community-centered work.

Skeletal samples

The individuals in this study are curated by the Mu-
seum of London. The plague victims (n = 49) included 
in this study were excavated from the Royal Mint site 
(London) (MIN86) in the 1980s and derive from two 
phases of burial at the site (Figs. 1– 2). The first phase 

is the East Smithfield cemetery (1348– 1350 A.D.), a 
planned emergency burial ground whose creation and 
use is recorded in a number of primary sources, with 
dates supported by coins from a purse found during 
excavation of the inhumations (Grainger et al. 2008). 
Plague victims from the City were buried there with 
care and respect in grave rows or previously prepared 
mass burial trenches. Although the names of some 
people buried at the cemetery are known from their 
wills, which stipulated their place of internment, 
none can be associated with an individual skeleton 
(Grainger et al. 2008). In 1350 A.D., the Royal household 
purchased adjacent land, enabling King Edward III to 
found a Cistercian abbey. This served the plague burial 
ground but also established its own cemetery, which 
was in use from 1350 to 1538 A.D.; again, although the 
names of some people buried there are documented, 

Figure 1. Map showing the location of London within the United Kingdom, scale 1:5,000,000  
(OS OpenData Downloads).

https://www.findingceremony.com/
https://www.findingceremony.com/


Population Affinity and Plague in Fourteenth-Century London314

none of the human remains in our study could be as-
sociated with a particular individual (Grainger and 
Phillpotts 2011). Archaeological and primary source 
evidence has established three burial phases at 
St.  Mary Graces, but only individuals from the first 
phase are included in our study, as they date from 
1350– 1400 A.D., when the plague was still present in 
London, including during the second major outbreak of 
plague in 1361 A.D. (Grainger and Phillpotts 2011). An-
cient DNA analysis of skeletons excavated from the 
emergency burial ground and the first burial phase of 
St. Mary Graces has identified Y. pestis at both sites (Bos 
et al. 2011; Klunk et al. 2019; Schuenemann et al. 2011).

Individuals who died from causes other than plague 
(the nonplague individuals, n = 96) included in this 
study were excavated from areas of St. Mary Graces 
not associated with plague outbreaks (n = 7) and from 
the St. Mary Spital cemetery (SRP98, n = 89) (Fig. 3) 
(Connell et al. 2012). The SRP98 cemetery was used 
over four distinct phases (as determined by archaeo-
logical and radiometric evidence): 1100– 1200, 1200– 
1250, 1250– 1400, and 1400– 1540 A.D. To ensure as 
best as possible that our analyses compared hazard 
rates (see below) for population affiliations during 
the SPP relative to nonplague mortality, we did not 

include individuals buried in SRP98 between 1250 
and 1400 A.D.

The human remains from MIN86 and SRP98 were 
recorded using the Wellcome Osteological Research 
Database (WORD) using published standard methods 
(Powers 2007, 2012): a total of 636 individuals from 
East Smithfield and 199 from the first burial phase at 
St. Mary Graces were recorded (Centre for Human 
Bioarchaeology 2007a, 2007b). Of these, 49 adult 
(> 18 years old) individuals were included in our study: 
40 from East Smithfield and nine from St.  Mary 
Graces. They had previously been selected for popu-
lation affiliation analysis (Redfern and Hefner 2019, 
2021) because they had the cranial vault and facial 
bones present that are used in the macromorphoscopic 
method (MMS) (Hefner and Linde 2018). The modern 
constructed identities often associated with race, such 
as “white” or “Black,” are not biological realities and 
the continuous and overlapping nature of human 
variation does not permit a rigid determination. In-
stead, any method only calculates probabilities of 
membership into some a priori established reference 
samples. To detach our estimates from the typological 
underpinnings of forensic anthropology, we utilized 
cranial data to estimate affinity, which Spradley and 

Figure 2. Map showing the location of the East Smithfield (MIN86) burial ground in London, England. © Museum of London Archaeology.



Redfern et al. 315

the white European sample. Of the nine plague indi-
viduals from St. Mary Graces, two were most similar 
to the white European sample, three to the Asian sam-
ple, and four to the African sample. Nonplague indi-
viduals from St. Mary Graces and SRP98 included 87 
individuals similar to the white European sample, one 
individual to the Asian sample, and eight individuals 
similar to the African sample. Tables 1 and 2 summa-
rize these data for each site. Redfern and Hefner 
(2019, 2021) provide additional details on this ap-
proach and our decision to pool those with white Eu-
ropean and Asian population affinity estimates.

Using site archive information and the ancient DNA 
(aDNA) evidence for Y. pestis, it was possible to estab-
lish that they were from the emergency burial ground 
or first phase of burial at St. Mary Graces and, there-
fore, were plague victims (Table 2). Previous research 
by DeWitte (2010a, 2014a, 2018) used transition analy-
sis to estimate age- at- death for individuals from 
MIN86 and SRP98. This method of adult age estima-
tion uses Bayesian statistics to avoid the problem of 
age- mimicry (i.e., estimates biased toward the known- 
age reference sample used to derive age estimation 
methods) that limits conventional methods of age es-
timation (Boldsen et  al. 2002). Importantly, it also 
yields point estimates of age for all possible adult ages, 
rather than broad interval estimates with an open- 
ended terminal category (e.g., > 45 years old), as is the 
case with conventional methods, thereby allowing for 
analysis of mortality patterns at advanced ages. Our 
previous research on selective mortality during the 
SPP used transition analysis age estimates. Therefore, 
for consistency, we used these age estimates because 
transition analysis estimates are less prone to age- 
mimicry and potentially more informative about 
mortality patterns at advanced adult ages. Although 
like most skeletal age estimation methods, the accu-
racy of this approach is not ideal (see Milner and Bold-
sen 2012), we have used the same method across all 
individuals in this study and are less concerned with 
individual estimates than with the aggregate pattern. 
Transition analysis age estimates were generated us-
ing the Anthropological Database, Odense University 
(ADBOU) Age Estimation software and selecting the 
informative “archaeological” prior distribution of ages 
at death. The archaeological prior, which is based on 
data from seventeenth- century Danish rural parish re-
cords, represents a generalized preindustrial mortal-
ity curve and is thus suited to medieval samples 
(Bullock et al. 2013).

We assess variation in risk of mortality, survivor-
ship, and evidence of exposure to physiological 
stress across population affinity groups within these 
cemetery samples. With respect to skeletal markers of 
physiological stress, we are mindful of the potential 

Jantz (2021) and Ross and Pilloud (2021) suggest is 
not attached to definitions of race and ethnicity, and 
does provide useful data for identification efforts 
and biodistance analysis. Therefore, we selected global 
reference samples from the MMS Databank, repre-
senting populations from Europe, North and South 
Africa, North and Southeast Asia, the Americas, 
South Pacific Islands, and the Middle East (Hefner 
and Linde 2018). Five MMS traits with demonstrable 
heritability estimates were selected to capture cra-
nial morphological variability and ecogeographical 
patterns of human variation. These data were passed 
through a classification model to produce a probabi-
listic estimate of population affiliation for each. Two 
associated statistics inform our analysis: (1) the accu-
racy of the models and (2) the probability estimates 
of each classification. Each model used leave- one- out 
cross- validation and had accuracies around 75% to 
80% (95% CI: 70.1% to 90%) for up to seven reference 
groups. In general, posterior probability values closer 
to 1.0 represent more similarity to the reference 
sample, while lower values suggest less likelihood of 
a correct classification. At East Smithfield, three indi-
viduals had cranial morphologies most similar to the 
Asian sample, five to the African sample, and 32 to 

Figure 3. Location of St. Mary Spital (SRP98) within London.  
© Museum of London Archaeology.



Population Affinity and Plague in Fourteenth-Century London316

effects of the osteological paradox (Wood et al. 1992), 
that is, that the presence of stress markers may not be 
a clear reflection of poor health in this context. Spe-
cifically, it is possible that the presence of stress mark-
ers may reflect resilience in some people, and the 
absence of them might reflect low frailty (or “good 
health”), contrary to conventional interpretations. 
Previous work on these populations has demonstrated 
that all of the nonspecific skeletal markers of physio-
logical stress used in this study were related to higher 
mortality risk during the SPP (DeWitte 2010b, 2014b, 
2014c, 2015, 2018; DeWitte and Wood 2008; Godde 
et  al. 2020). Previous work in this context has also 
demonstrated that although the presence of periosteal 

new bone formation (PNBF) in general is associated 
with elevated risks of mortality (DeWitte and Wood 
2008), healed PNBF is associated with higher survi-
vorship and thus may reflect resilience (DeWitte 2014). 
That is, by leveraging age- structured data to over-
come some of the potential limitations posed by het-
erogeneous frailty and selective mortality (DeWitte 
and Stojanowski 2015; Wood et al. 1992), our previ-
ous research has established that these skeletal stress 
markers are, at least in this context, useful markers of 
frailty or resilience. Therefore, we used data collected 
by the second author for presence/absence of linear 
enamel hypoplasia (LEH) on the left mandibular ca-
nine, cribra orbitalia (CO) on the left orbit, and PNBF 

Table 1. List of individuals from St. Mary Spital (SRP98), context (skeleton number), date, burial type, sex, and population affiliation group (PPG). 
M (male), P.M (probable male), F (female), I (intermediate); SRP98 burial types: A/B/C (attritional cemetery), D (multilayered, horizontal stacked 
rows within a single grave cut) (Connell et al. 2012:13).

Context Date
Burial 
Type Sex PPG

Age 
(years)

1334 1200– 1250 A M White European 20.62
1716 1100– 1200 B F White European
2344 1400– 1539 A F White European 28.94
2487 1400– 1539 D F White European 51
2646 1400– 1539 A PM White European 33.74
2657 1400– 1539 A PM White European 39.01
2679 1400– 1539 A M African 65.44
2907 1400– 1539 A PM White European 40.93
3037 1400– 1539 A PM African 35.71
3172 1200– 1250 A M White European 22.46
3515 1400– 1539 A M African 24.19
3533 1100– 1200 A F White European
3538 1200– 1250 B F White European 30.6
3775 1400– 1539 A F White European 47.01
3934 1200– 1250 D F White European 59.8
5275 1200– 1250 A M White European 35.31
5510 1100– 1200 A F White European 42.4
5561 1100– 1200 C F White European
5677 1100– 1200 A F White European 34.4
5794 1100– 1200 A F White European
5869 1100– 1200 A F White European
6427 1400– 1539 A M White European 34.39
6571 1100– 1200 A M White European
7127 1400– 1539 A F White European 19.05
7266 1400– 1539 A F White European 29.36
7383 1200– 1250 A M White European 32.79
7616 1400– 1539 A PM White European 48.59
7701 1400– 1539 A M White European 23.56
7796 1400– 1539 A F White European 32.44
7915 1400– 1539 A M White European 34.17
8264 1400– 1539 A F White European 30.74
9260 1400– 1539 A M White European 21.94
9420 1100– 1200 A F White European
9632 1100– 1200 D M White European 21.5
9789 1100– 1200 D M White European 34.8
10124 1400– 1539 A I White European 24.99
10765 1400– 1539 A F White European 34.15
10794 1400– 1539 A PM White European 76.39
11050 1400– 1539 A M White European 15.49
11136 1400– 1539 A M White European 26.1
11221 1400– 1539 A F White European 30.18
11428 1400– 1539 A F White European 19.71
12238 1400– 1539 A M White European 18.5
12714 1200– 1250 A M White European 29
12923 1200– 1250 A I White European 30.77

Context Date
Burial 
Type Sex PPG

Age 
(years)

14307 1200– 1250 A PM White European 34.3
14493 1400– 1539 A F White European 27.19
14868 1200– 1250 A M White European 31.46
15030 1200– 1250 A F White European 19.33
15339 1200– 1250 A M White European 18.5
17496 1200– 1250 A F White European 30.09
19503 1400– 1539 D F White European 19
19618 1400– 1539 A M White European 35.74
19950 1200– 1250 D F White European 49.9
20082 1200– 1250 A F African 19.35
20184 1400– 1539 A PM White European 36.47
20255 1400– 1539 A F White European 36.32
20360 1200– 1250 A PM White European 21
20462 1400– 1539 A M White European 24.88
20682 1200– 1250 D M White European 30.5
21011 1400– 1539 A M White European 33.33
21099 1400– 1539 A M African 19.51
21273 1100– 1200 A M White European
21371 1400– 1539 A M White European 30.28
21569 1400– 1539 A M White European 17.5
22105 1400– 1539 A M White European 26.14
22640 1200– 1250 D F White European 18
22648 1200– 1250 A I White European 23.71
23103 1200– 1250 A F White European 26.6
23441 1400– 1539 A M White European 25.8
23448 1400– 1539 A P.F African 18
23514 1200– 1250 D M White European 26
24010 1100– 1200 D F White European 30.3
24185 1100– 1200 D F White European 50
25492 1200– 1250 A PM White European 25.44
25737 1200– 1250 A M White European 18.5
25832 1200– 1250 A I White European 18.71
27177 1400– 1539 A F White European 18.5
27476 1100– 1200 A M African
29462 1400– 1539 A F White European 15
29698 1200– 1250 A F White European 31.8
30039 1200– 1250 A P.F White European 16.56
30212 1200– 1250 D M White European 74.7
30448 1200– 1250 A M White European 20.5
30939 1200– 1250 A PM White European 15
31245 1200– 1250 A PM White European 24.25
32091 1200– 1250 A F White European 44.5
32302 1200– 1250 D M White European 18.5
33167 1200– 1250 A F White European 31.6



Redfern et al. 317

Table 2. List of individuals from the Royal Mint site (MIN86) organized by burial ground: East Smithfield (plague burials) and St. Mary Graces 
(potential plague and nonplague burials), plague score, context (skeleton number), sex (M male, F female) and population affiliation group (PPG) 
and code, and transition analysis age estimate.

Site 
Code Site Name Plague Context Sex PPG

PPG Code 3  
(0: white 

European, 
1: African, 
2: Asian)

PPG Code 2  
(0: white 

European/
Asian,  

1: African)

Plague Code 
(0: nonplague, 

1: plague)
Age 

(years)

MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 5272 M White European 0 0 1 57.45
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 5281 M African 1 1 1 20.19
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 5283 F White European 0 0 1 17.63
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 5285 M White European 0 0 1 33.28
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 5741 F African 1 1 1 31.16
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 5902 F African 1 1 1 15
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 5960 M White European 0 0 1 31.74
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 6428 F White European 0 0 1 17.9
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 6467 F White European 0 0 1 18.72
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 6532 F White European 0 0 1 38.82
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 7065 M White European 0 0 1 24.05
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 7094 M White European 0 0 1 15
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 7163 F White European 0 0 1 30.69
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 7381 F Asian 2 0 1 15
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 8277 M White European 0 0 1 26.41
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 8343 M White European 0 0 1 32.25
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 8427 F White European 0 0 1 29.01
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 9540 M African 1 1 1 19.8
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 9807 F White European 0 0 1 19.45
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11108 F Asian 2 0 1 43.1
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11109 F White European 0 0 1 20.34
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11115 M White European 0 0 1 28.21
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11118 M White European 0 0 1 33.52
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11193 M White European 0 0 1 43.01
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11244 F African 1 1 1 20.77
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11430 F White European 0 0 1 28.19
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11625 M Asian 2 0 1 18.88
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11627 M White European 0 0 1 18.67
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11857 M White European 0 0 1 78.13
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11914 M White European 0 0 1 15
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 11944 M White European 0 0 1 48.5
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 12566 M White European 0 0 1 23.89
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 12567 M White European 0 0 1 39.3
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 12643 F White European 0 0 1 22.66
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 12700 F White European 0 0 1 35.21
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 12790 F White European 0 0 1 45.87
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 12813 M White European 0 0 1 57.18
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 12814 F White European 0 0 1 34.19
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 12815 M White European 0 0 1 15
MIN86 East Smithfield Plague 20003 F White European 0 0 1
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Potential plague 6272 F Asian 2 0 1 18.73
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Potential plague 6371 M African 1 1 1 17.5
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Potential plague 6565 F White European 0 0 1 33.61
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Potential plague 8015 F African 1 1 1 21.04
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Potential plague 8108 M African 1 1 1
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Potential plague 9519 F African 1 1 1 19.5
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Potential plague 9901 M Asian 2 0 1 17.01
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Potential plague 11030 M Asian 2 0 1 72.3
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Potential plague 12664 F White European 0 0 1 24.47
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Nonplague 9395 M White European 0 0 0
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Nonplague 9417 M Asian 2 0 0 75.22
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Nonplague 9425 M African 1 1 0 68.21
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Nonplague 10170 M White European 0 0 0 17.5
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Nonplague 12297 F White European 0 0 0 30.73
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Nonplague 12339 F White European 0 0 0 72.24
MIN86 St. Mary Graces Nonplague 13935 M White European 0 0 0 35.26



Population Affinity and Plague in Fourteenth-Century London318

on the left tibia. The first two can only occur during 
childhood and have multifactorial origins, with LEH 
reflecting disruptions of ameloblast activity during 
enamel development (Towle and Irish 2020) and CO 
often in response to anemia (Brickley 2018). PNBF also 
has multifactorial origins, such as infection or trauma, 
but can form at any point during life (Weston 2012). 
Although these signs of physiological stress have mul-
tifactorial origins, making diagnosis of specific etiol-
ogies difficult or impossible, bio archae ol o gi cal research 
has demonstrated that they provide crucial insights 
into stress and, by careful inference, health in past 
populations (Larsen 2015). Comparison of these 
skeletal markers across the groups in this study thus 
has the potential to reveal differences in exposures 
to physiological stressors or frailty/health based on 
population affinity.

Statistical analyses

We initially performed analyses comparing all three 
population affinity groups. We also pooled samples 
estimated as white European and Asian for all analy-
ses. We did so for a number of supportable reasons, 
including the weak likelihood estimates among the 
Asian- estimated sample and preliminary analysis re-
vealing no significant differences in hazards of dying 
between those with estimated white European and 
Asian population affiliation (indicating pooling would 
not result in loss of resolution or reduced power for the 
overall hazard model). Differences in hazards of dy-
ing among the population affinity were assessed using 
the Cox proportional hazards model. The Cox propor-
tional hazards model evaluates the hazard of an event 
(in this case, death from plague) and is thus also re-
flective of survival, with estimated hazard ratios above 
1 indicating decreased survival times associated with 
the variable of interest, and hazard ratios below 1 in-
dicating greater survival times. This semi- parametric 
model allows for the estimation of differences in haz-
ards of dying (or survival) within a sample based on 
variables of interest but does not require the specifi-
cation of a parametric baseline hazard function and 
is thus suited to the relatively small sample sizes avail-
able for this study. For analyses of all three popula-
tion affinity groups, individuals estimated to be white 
European were assigned a score of 0, those with esti-
mated African population affiliation were assigned a 
score of 1, and those with estimated Asian population 
affiliation were assigned a score of 2. For analysis us-
ing pooled data from those with estimated white Eu-
ropean and Asian population affiliations, individuals 
estimated to be white European or Asian were as-
signed a score of 0 and those with estimated African 
population affiliation were assigned a score of 1. 

Following Godde et  al. (2020), we applied the Cox 
model to data from both plague and nonplague buri-
als, using a binary outcome variable of “death from 
plague” (coded as 1 for individuals buried in East 
Smithfield or the plague area of St. Mary Graces) or 
“other cause of death” (coded as 0 for individuals bur-
ied in St. Mary Graces >c. 1400, SRP98, c. 1100– 1250, 
and SRP98 c. 1400– 1540), with age- at- death as the 
time scale (Tables 1 and 2). We take an intersectional 
approach and avoid the assumption that the experi-
ences of people of different population affinities would 
have been uniform across sex within each population 
affinity group. To determine whether the intersection 
of sex and population affinity amplified poor outcomes, 
we compare survivorship and hazards of mortality 
separately by estimated sex.

Due to limited sample sizes, differences in numbers 
of males and females, proportions of individuals of es-
timated population affiliations, and the presence/ab-
sence of skeletal physiological stress indicators 
among the groups were evaluated using Fisher’s exact 
tests. In some contexts, skeletal indicators of physio-
logical stress have been shown to be associated with 
age, and previous research has demonstrated that the 
frequency of PNBF increases with age (DeWitte 
2014c; Grauer 1993). It is therefore possible that ob-
served differences between groups in the frequencies 
of skeletal indicators of physiological stress might be 
an artifact of the interaction between age- associated 
skeletal indicators of stress and differences between 
the age- at- death distributions of those groups, rather 
than reflecting true differences in exposure to physi-
ological stress. For example, one group might have a 
higher frequency of PNBF compared to another 
simply because it has a greater proportion of older 
adults. To determine whether this might have an ef-
fect on our findings, binary logistic regression was 
used to evaluate the relationship between age and 
each skeletal indicator of stress used in our study.

All analyses were performed in SPSS. We selected 
a priori a p- value of less than 0.1 as indicative of a trend 
worthy of consideration. As in previous work, we 
chose this alpha level in light of the fact that, as is typ-
ical in bioarchaeology, we are working with small 
sample sizes, and adherence to a conventional alpha 
level of 0.05 could hinder dissemination of results that 
might reflect larger population patterns and stimulate 
additional study.

Results

Analysis of adults from the population affiliation 
groups (Tables 1 and 2) did not reveal any significant 
differences among the groups with respect to sex 



Redfern et al. 319

affiliation groups and of the pooled white European/
Asian vs. African population affiliation groups are 
shown in Table 5. These results indicate that for the 
female- only sample, individuals of estimated African 
population affinity have a significantly higher esti-
mated hazard of dying of plague compared to those 
with estimated white European affinity. There are no 
significant associations for any of the other compar-
isons. When we pool people with estimated white 
European and Asian population affinity, using the 
pooled- sex sample and the male-  only sample, these 
analyses did not reveal evidence of significant differ-
ences in hazard rates between population affiliation 
groups. However, using the female- only sample, the 
results indicate that individuals with estimated Afri-
can affiliation have a significantly higher estimated 
hazard of dying of plague compared to those with 
estimated white European/Asian affiliation. This re-
sult suggests how intersectionality— the compounded 
harm of race and gender and misogynoir (Bailey 2021; 
Crenshaw 1989, 1991)— may have impacted mortality 
during medieval pandemic disease.

The results of binary logistic regression to evaluate 
the association between age and each physiological 
stress indicator for the plague burials are shown in 
Table 6. As has been shown previously (DeWitte 2014b, 
2014c, 2018), there is a significant positive association 
between age and PNBF. However, neither LEH nor CO 
are significantly associated with age. Comparison of 
frequencies of physiological stress between the affilia-
tion groups (Table 7) revealed higher rates of LEH but 
lower rates of CO and PNBF in individuals with esti-
mated African affiliation and compared to those with 
white European/Asian affiliation. None of these differ-
ences were statistically significant.

ratios for either the plague or the nonplague sam-
ples. Using data from all three population affiliation 
groups, there are significantly higher proportions of 
people of estimated African and Asian affiliation in 
the plague burials compared to the nonplague buri-
als, as shown in Table 3. Similarly, when using data 
from the pooled white European/Asian vs. African 
population affiliation groups, there is a significantly 
higher proportion of people of estimated African af-
filiation in the plague burials compared to the non-
plague burials (18.4% vs. 8.3%, Fisher’s exact p = 0.076). 
The mean ages at death and the corresponding 95% 
confidence intervals for each group among the plague 
burials are shown in Table 4. The results of Cox pro-
portional hazards analyses of all three population 

Table 3. Frequencies of individuals of each estimated population 
affiliation group in the plague vs. nonplague burials.

Population Affiliation Plague Nonplague p- value

African 9 (18.4%) 8 (8.33%) 0.002
Asian 6 (12.2%) 1 (1.04%)
White European 34 (69.4%) 87 (90.63%)

African 9 (18.4%) 8 (8.3%) 0.076
White European/Asian 40 (81.6%) 88 (91.7%)

Table 4. Mean ages at death in years (and corresponding 95% confidence 
intervals) for each population affiliation among plague burials.

Population Affiliation
Mean Age 
at Death 95% CI

White European (n = 33) 31.435 26.621– 36.249
African (n = 8) 20.620 17.362– 23.878
Asian (n = 6) 30.837 12.586– 49.087
White European/Asian (n = 39) 31.34 26.52– 36.17
African (n = 8) 20.62 17.36– 23.88

Table 5. Cox proportional hazards analysis results comparing (a) all three population affiliation groups and (b) white European/Asian and African: 
hazard ratios, Exp(β), with corresponding 95% confidence intervals. The asterisk indicates, for each comparison, which population affiliation is the 
reference group; significant results are indicated in bold.

a Population Affiliation Exp(β) 95% CI p- value

Pooled sexes White European* (n = 111) and African (n = 15) 1.323 0.765– 2.288 0.317
White European* (n = 111) and Asian (n = 7) 0.699 0.319– 1.529 0.37
African* (n = 15) and Asian (n = 7) 0.613 0.215– 1.747 0.36

Female White European* (n = 47) and African (n = 7) 3.21 1.373– 7.506 0.007
White European* (n = 47) and Asian (n = 3) 1.532 0.470– 4.997 0.479
African* (n = 7) and Asian (n = 3) 0.699 0.141– 3.464 0.661

Male White European* (n = 60) and African (n = 8) 0.932 0.439– 1.977 0.854
White European* (n = 60) and Asian (n = 4) 0.598 0.211– 1.692 0.332
African* (n = 8) and Asian (n = 4) 0.426 0.086– 2.110 0.296

b

Pooled sexes White European/Asian* and African 1.374 0.798– 2.366 0.252
Female White European/Asian* and African 2.995 1.290– 6.950 0.011
Male White European/Asian* and African 1.029 0.488– 2.167 0.941



Population Affinity and Plague in Fourteenth-Century London320

would have primarily been in the working class, espe-
cially domestic labor. The use of a Black feminist meth-
odology has meant that we can now analyze these 
data specifically with a “multi- issue” lens. We point to 
Crenshaw’s discussion of how intersectionality works 
in relation to discrimination and compounded harm 
as a way to consider why Black women would have 
been at higher risk:

The point is that Black women can experience 
discrimination in any number of ways and 
that the contradiction arises from our assump-
tions that their claims of exclusion must be uni-
directional. Consider an analogy to traffic in an 
intersection, coming and going in all four direc-
tions. Discrimination, like traffic through an 
intersection, may flow in one direction, and it 
may flow in another. If an accident happens in 
an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling 
from any number of directions and, sometimes, 
from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is 
harmed because she is in the intersection, her 
injury could result from sex discrimination or 
race discrimination. (Crenshaw 1989:149)

However, in our case with our data, we would like 
to add to the sentence “if a Black woman is harmed 
because she is in the intersection, her injury could 
result from sex discrimination or race discrimina-
tion,” the issue of class discrimination and disability 
discrimination.

Because of the white imaginary in relation to the 
Black population’s erasure in medieval England, there 
is little scholarship that discusses the contours of the 
labor of Black women. However, if we look at the schol-
arship in early modern England, the discussion is 
more robust and has pointed to Black women primar-
ily being working class, especially as domestic labor 
(Akhimie 2018; Brown 2021). A Black woman’s situa-
tion in domestic service also brings up the specter 
of  labor theft, hard manual labor, as well as sexual 
 harassment, coercion, if not assault because of her 
status as household servant. Harris (2022) speaks of 
this most in relation to Chaucer and the recent reas-
sessment happening in regards to his “rape/raptus” 
case that involves Cecily Chaumpaigne. As she dis-
cusses “the numerous female servants” in Chaucer’s 
oeuvre, she explains that “We must think about how 
these figures are subject to assumptions about wom-
en’s labor and who owns it, how they embody gen-
dered vulnerability, and how they are expected to 
subordinate their wills to those of others” (Harris 
2022:477). Harris (2022:477) further points to Phipps’s 
(2020:141– 142) work on “raptus” (the very wide term 
for rape that included abduction to physical assault in 

Discussion

These results suggest that, at least for females, individ-
uals with estimated African affiliation faced higher 
hazards of dying of plague compared to individuals of 
estimated white European affiliations of similar ages. 
The higher observed rates of LEH in individuals in the 
plague burials with estimated African (100%) com-
pared to those with white European/Asian popula-
tion affiliation (71%) might be an artifact of small 
sample sizes. Alternatively, this might reflect differ-
ences in either exposure to stressors or survival of 
acute physiological stress during childhood, poten-
tially reflecting enslavement/unfreedom.

For past populations, just as much as for living pop-
ulations, it is essential that we are careful to avoid the 
incorrect and harmful implication that there is a bio-
logical basis of race, and we actively oppose the incor-
rect inference that there is something inherent to 
people assigned to a certain racial category that makes 
them more vulnerable to disease. Instead, we empha-
size here that variation by race in susceptibility to and 
hazard of dying from disease reflects the biological 
and psychosocial effects of racism, which was present 
in the medieval world (Heng 2018a); race is a social 
classification and is not based in biological reality, but 
it does have biological consequences (American Asso-
ciation of Biological Anthropologists 2019; Fuentes 
and Rouse 2016; Gravlee 2009; Lans 2020; McLean 
2019; Weheliye 2014).

The data that we have analyzed here reveal that 
Black women, because of the structural harm of mi-
sogynoir, had a higher risk of SPP death. But what 
are the potential contexts of this higher risk? Along 
with anti- Blackness and misogyny, these women 
would have dealt with issues around class because they 

Table 6. Results of binary logistic regression of age and each 
 physiological stress indicator among plague burials. LEH  
(linear enamel hypoplasia), PNBF (periosteal new bone formation).

Pathology Exp(β) 95% CI p- value

LEH (n = 39) 1.004 0.95– 1.07 0.88
PNBF (n = 28) 1.13 1.02– 1.26 0.018
Cribra orbitalia (n = 35) 0.974 0.91– 1.04 0.45

Table 7. Frequencies of physiological stress indicators and p- values 
from Fisher’s exact tests of differences among population affiliations 
(plague burials). LEH (linear enamel hypoplasia), PNBF (periosteal 
new bone formation).

Pathology White European Asian African p- value

LEH 21/26 (80.8%) 1/4 (20%) 8/8 (100%) 0.005
PNBF 6/20 (30%) 0 (0%) 1/5 (20%) 0.803
Cribra orbitalia 8/26 (30.8%) 0 (0%) 1/7 (14.3%) 0.804



Redfern et al. 321

the Middle Ages) occurring in court cases “involving 
servant women in late medieval town courts” (Phipps 
2020:141– 142). She also examines Lewis’s (2016) work 
on the osteology of medieval “urban servant women” 
to discuss how the gender and class discrimination 
manifested in these women’s remains. She quotes 
Lewis’s conclusion: “There are suggestions that domes-
tic service caused strain on the legs and backs of the 
urban females. . . .  Overall it was the urban females 
that carried the burden of respiratory and infectious 
diseases, suggesting they may have been the most vul-
nerable group in medieval society” (Harris 2022:478; 
Lewis 2016:138– 171). The osteological discussion aligns 
with what our data show in relation to infectious pan-
demic disease. The osteological information also re-
veals the ways in which urban servant women would 
have been prone to physical disability because of their 
manual labor work and exposure to disease. Harris 
(2022) finishes this section of her article to point to 
the many scholars who have discussed the sexual vul-
nerability of domestic women servants in the late 
Middle Ages (see Kettle 1995; McIntosh 1984; Wer-
ner 2016). We can further speculate about the lives 
that these women may have lived and even their po-
tential literacy if we consider Phillips’s recent work 
(2022, 2023) on Black servants and their consump-
tion of conduct books in early modern Europe.

All these contextual considerations and specula-
tions would not have been possible without a Black 
feminist bio archae ol o gi cal methodology. For example, 
if we were to revisit Lewis’s (2016) group of women’s 
remains analyzed as part of “Work and the Adolescent 
in Medieval England (AD 900– 1550): The Osteologi-
cal Evidence,” and we used a Black feminist method-
ology that included race as an analytic category, what 
further nuance in the bio archae ol o gi cal analysis could 
we find? What could align with our current discussions 
about misgnoir and intersectionality?

Conclusions

We are currently witnessing, on a horrifying scale, the 
biological effects of racism in the COVID- 19 pan-
demic. Evidence is emerging that Black communi-
ties across the Global North comprise an alarmingly 
disproportionate number of cases and deaths (Fuen-
tes 2020; Paton et al. 2020; Rossen et al. 2020). Pirtle 
(2020) compellingly argues that this demonstrates 
the effects of racial capitalism increase the risk of co-
morbid conditions in Black Americans (see African 
American Policy Forum 2020).

Clearly, medieval England, and the embodied expe-
riences of London’s racialized Black population, as 
attested in the primary sources (Adi 2019), and based 

on preliminary data from a sample of 89 individuals 
from two cemeteries, who appear to make up 20% to 
30% of the population (Redfern and Hefner 2021), are 
not directly comparable to modern populations. How-
ever, this study’s results suggest that the health out-
comes of structural and anti-Black racism we see today 
might have had parallels during the SPP.

This study’s findings, in addition to improving how 
we understand the history of racialized marginaliza-
tion’s effects on human health and mortality, highlight 
the heterogeneity that exists within the human re-
mains that we rely on to reconstruct premodern life. 
Much of the variation in frailty and embodied experi-
ences present in archaeological human remains is 
largely hidden from our view (DeWitte and Sto-
janowski 2015; Wood et al. 1992). Our previous work 
focused on those variables most often utilized in bio-
archaeology: age, sex, and pathological conditions. But 
the patterns revealed by analyzing just those data mask 
a tremendous amount of underlying variation and the 
outcomes of intersections across varied biosocial di-
mensions. By applying multiple analytical approaches 
to and lines of evidence from these skeletal samples, 
we have the potential to uncover some of that once 
hidden heterogeneity to better understand the forces 
that shaped past lives. We also argue that the way for-
ward in medieval bioarchaeology is with a Black fem-
inist methodology, which we believe has revealed an 
example of how intersectionality works in relation to 
pandemic disease.

We recommend that intersectionality and criti-
cal race theories become integrated into medieval 
bio archae ol o gi cal studies, as well as the pandemic 
necropolitics seen in certain premodern racialized 
communities. Although not without issue, we hope 
that geographically, temporally, and local, condition- 
specific MMS can make a contribution to reassessing 
the medieval European archive of remains, documen-
tary, and visual evidence. We believe Black feminist 
methodology is foundational to narrate the lived ex-
perience of Black people, whose substantial premod-
ern English community has been elided and erased.

We conclude here by taking a small step and cue 
from Hartman’s (2019) “Wayward Lives” to method-
ologically reimagine one Black woman from our 
study here and resituate her in the space of medieval 
London. This is just a sketch of possibilities and the 
strands that can be pulled to begin piecing a counter-
narrative of a medieval Black London. In Chaucer’s 
Cook’s Tale, Perkyn Revelour plans to move in with 
his gambling friend and his sex- worker wife— the liv-
ing situation suggests a potential polyamorous rela-
tionship. He is described earlier as carousing with a 
“wench,” gambling, and playing music. In these short 
lines, we get a picture of medieval London’s urban 



Population Affinity and Plague in Fourteenth-Century London322

street culture, where Perkyn watches the parades in 
Cheapside and gets himself locked up in Newgate 
prison on occasion. Harris (2019) has written and 
discussed the contours of racialized and gendered 
terminology around the word wench in relation to 
transatlantic chattel slavery in the British and Amer-
ican context. Wench was a reference to Black women 
servants (i.e., ones who were enslaved) who were seen 
as “sexually available” in nineteenth- century American 
media. Harris (2019) does a philological deep- dive into 
the development of wench in late medieval English. 
Specifically in Chaucer, they reveals how its use always 
references the social hierarchy of servant, below a lady 
(Merchant’s Tale), and consistently is coupled with sex-
ual availability (Merchant’s Tale), including that of 
toxic rape culture and gender- based sexual violence 
(Reeve’s Tale). Can Perkyn Revelour’s “wench” be an-
other Black woman servant also working and living 
in the London streets but finding time to dance, play 
dice, and drink with a medieval Black cook? Can we 
imagine her in Hartman’s (2019) opening to Way-
ward Lives but in London’s fourteenth- century urban 
streets filled with brothels, shops, outdoor dice 
games, and taverns selling beer:

You can find her in the group of beautiful thugs 
and too fast girls congregating on the corner and 
humming the latest rag, . . .  Watch her in the al-
ley passing a pitcher of beer back and forth with 
her friends. . . .  Step onto any of the paths that 
cross the sprawling city and you’ll encounter her 
as she roams. (Hartman 2019:3)

Acknowledgments

RR is forever indebted to Stuart Wyatt (MoL) for 
managing to combine his one hour’s exercise during 
lockdown 2020 with retrieving the MIN86 site report 
from the Archaeological Archive. Funding to SND 
from the NSF (BCS- 0406252, BCS- 1261682) and the 
Wenner- Gren Foundation (#7142, #8247) supported 
data collection from East Smithfield and St.  Mary 
Graces. Permission to sample the human remains from 
MIN86 and SRP98 was given by the Museum of Lon-
don in accordance with their ethical policies (https:// 
www . museumoflondon . org . uk / about - us / corporate 
- information / policies). We are grateful to Dr.  Kelly 
Kamnikar at University of New Mexico who provided 
the Spanish translation of our abstract.

References

Adi, Hakim. 2019. Black British History: New Perspectives. 
Bloomsbury Academic, London.

African American Policy Forum. 2020. Under the Blacklight. 
https:// aapf . org / all - episodes - utb. Accessed 11 June 2020.

Akhimie, Patricia. 2018. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Dif-
ference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. Rout-
ledge Studies in Shakespeare 29. Routledge, New York and 
Abingdon.

Alfani, Guido, and Marco Bonetti. 2019. A survival analysis of the 
last great European plagues: The case of Nonantola (Northern 
Italy) in 1630. Population Studies 73 (1):101– 118. DOI: 10 . 1080 
/ 00324728 . 2018 . 1457794

American Association of Biological Anthropologists. 2019. 
AABA Statement on Race & Racism. https:// bioanth . org / about 
/ posi tion - statements / aapa - statement - race - and - racism - 2019/. 
Accessed 11 August 2022.

Bailey, Moya. 2021. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Dig-
ital Resistance. New York University Press, New York.

Barnes, Jodi, A. 2021. Behind the scenes of Hollywood: An ar-
chaeology of reproductive oppression at the intersections. 
American Anthropologist 123(1):9– 35. DOI: 10 . 1111 / aman . 13511.

Barron, Caroline, Martha Carlin, and Joel T. Rosenthal, eds. 2017. 
Medieval London: Collected Papers of Caroline M. Barron. Me-
dieval Institute Publications, London.

Battle- Baptiste, Whitney. 2016. Black Feminist Archaeology. Rout-
ledge, London.

Belcastro, Maria Giovanna, and Valentina Mariotti. 2021. The 
place of human remains in the frame of cultural heritage: The 
restitution of medieval skeletons from a Jewish cemetery. Jour-
nal of Cultural Heritage 49:229– 238. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . culher 
. 2021 . 04 . 002.

Bethard, Jonathan D., and Elizabeth A. DiGangi. 2020. Letter to 
the editor— moving beyond a lost cause: Forensic anthropol-
ogy and ancestry estimates in the United States. Journal of Fo-
rensic Sciences 65(5):1791– 1792. DOI: 10 . 1111 / 1556 - 4029 . 14513.

Blakey, Michael L. 1991. Man and Nature: White and Other. De-
colonizing anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropol-
ogy for Liberation. American Anthropological Association and 
Association of Black Anthropologists, Alexandria, VA.

Blakey, Michael L. 2020. Archaeology under the blinding light of 
race. Current Anthropology 61(S22):S183– S197. DOI: 10 . 1086 
/ 710357.

Boldsen, Jesper  L., George  R. Milner, Lyle  W. Konigsberg, 
James W. Wood, Robert D. Hoppa, and James W. Vaupel. 2002. 
Transition analysis: A new method for estimating age from 
skeletons. In Paleodemography: Age Distributions from Skele-
tal Samples, edited by Robert D. Hoppa and James W. Vaupel. 
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 73– 106.

Bos, Kirsten I., Verena J. Schuenemann, G. Brian Golding, Herná 
A. Burbano, Nicholas Waglechner, Brian  K. Coombes, et  al. 
2011. A draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black 
Death. Nature 478(7370):506– 510. DOI: 10 . 1038 / nature 10549.

Bos, Kirsten I., Philip Stevens, Kay Nieselt, Hendrik N. Poinar, 
Sharon N. DeWitte, and Johannes Krause. 2012. Yersinia pes-
tis: New evidence for an old infection. PLoS One 7(11):e49803. 
DOI: 10 . 1371 / journal . pone . 0049803.

Brickley, Megan B. 2018. Cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperosto-
sis: A biological approach to diagnosis. American Journal of 
Physical Anthropology 167(4):896– 902. DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajpa . 23701.

Brown, D. S. 2021. “Hood feminism”: Whiteness and segregated 
(premodern) scholarly discourse in the post- postracial era. Lit-
erature Compass 18(10):e12608. DOI: 10 . 1111 / lic3 . 12608.

Brown- Vincent, Layla D. 2019. Seeing it for wearing it: Autoeth-
nography as Black feminist methodology. Taboo: The Journal 
of Culture and Education 18(1):8.

Bullock, Meggan, Lourdes Márquez, Patricia Hernández, and Fer-
nando Ruíz. 2013. Paleodemographic age‐at‐death distributions of 
two Mexican skeletal collections: A comparison of transition 

https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/about-us/corporate-information/policies
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/about-us/corporate-information/policies
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/about-us/corporate-information/policies
https://aapf.org/all-episodes-utb
https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/
https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/


Redfern et al. 323

analysis and traditional aging methods. American Journal of 
Physical Anthropology 152(1):67– 78.

Byrne, Joseph P. 2012. Encyclopedia of the Black Death. ABC- 
CLIO LLC, Santa Barbara, CA.

Castex, Dominique, and Sacha Kacki. 2016. Demographic pat-
terns distinctive of epidemic cemeteries in archaeological 
samples. Microbiology Spectrum 4(4):1– 9. DOI: 10 . 1128 / micro 
biolspec . PoH - 0015 - 2015.

Centre for Human Bioarchaeology. 2007a. East Smithfield Black 
Death cemetery summary. https:// www . museumoflondon . org 
. uk / collections / other - collection - databases - and - libraries / cen 
tre - human - bioarchaeology / osteological - database / medieval 
- ce meteries / east - smithfield - black - death - medieval. Accessed 
19 May 2020.

Centre for Human Bioarchaeology. 2007b. St.  Mary Graces. 
https:// www . museumof london . org . uk / collections / other 
- collection - databases - and - libraries / centre - human - bioarcha 
eology / osteological - database / medieval - cemeteries / st - mary 
- graces. Accessed 19 May 2020.

Cho, Helen, Phoebe R. Stubblefield, Jesse R. Goliath, Meghan- 
Tomasita Cosgriff- Hernandez, Elizabeth DiGangi, Alba  E. 
Craig, et al. 2021. Blinded by the white: Forensic anthropology 
and ancestry estimation webinar. https:// drive . google . com 
/ file / d / 1MHpgQCVpDs77s15z0AKNnIOU - poSA3eL / view. 
Accessed 9 November 2021.

Chouin, Gérard. 2018a. Sillages de la peste noire en Afrique sub-
saharienne: une exploration critique du silence. Afriques 9. 
https:// doi . org / 10 . 4000 / afriques . 2084.

Chouin, Gérard. 2018b. Reflections on plague in African history 
(14th- 19th c.). Afriques 9. https:// doi . org / 10 . 4000 / afriques . 2228.

Christakos, George, A. Ricardo Olea, L. Marc Serre, Hwa- Lung 
Yu, and Lin- Lin Wang. 2005. Interdisciplinary Public Health 
Reasoning and Epidemic Modelling: The Case of Black Death. 
Springer, Berlin.

Christmas, Danielle. 2019. From Neo- Confederate narratives to 
heritage politics. Paper presented at the Modern Language Asso-
ciation and the American Historical Association: Nostalgia and 
Narrative after Charlottesville: Comparing Myths of Origins in 
the Middle Ages and the American Civil War, Chicago, IL.

Cohn, Samuel K., Jr. 2008. Epidemiology of the Black Death and 
successive waves of plague. Medical History, Supplement (27):74– 
100. https:// www . ncbi . nlm . nih . gov / pmc / articles / PMC 2630035/.

Colet, Anna, Josep X. Muntané i Santiveri, Jordi R. Ventura, Oriol 
Saula, M. Eulá Subirà de Galdàcano, and Clara Jáuregui. 2016. 
The Black Death and its consequences for the Jewish com-
munity in Tàrrega: Lessons from history and archaeology. The 
Medieval Globe 1 (1):Article 5. https:// scholarworks . wmich 
. edu / tmg / vol1 / iss1 / 5.

Colomer, Laia. 2014. The politics of human remains in managing 
archaeological Medieval Jewish burial grounds in Europe. Nor-
disk kulturpolitisj tidsskrift 17(2):168– 186.

DOI: 10 . 18261 / ISSN2000 - 8325 - 2014 - 02 - 0.
Columbia University. 2020. Bearing witness: The Covid and 

Inequality History Documentation Project. https:// bearing 
witness . github . io. Accessed 20 June 2021.

Connell, Brian, Amy Gray Jones, Rebecca C. Redfern, and Don 
Walker. 2012. Spitalfields: A Bio archae ol o gi cal Study of Health 
and Disease from a Medieval London Cemetery. Archaeologi-
cal excavations at Spitalfields Market 1991- 2007. Museum of 
London Archaeology Monograph 60. Museum of London Ar-
chaeology, London.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. Demarginalizing the intersection of 
race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination 
doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of 
Chicago Legal Forum 139(1):Article 8. http:// chicagounbound 
. uchicago . edu / uclf / vol1989 / iss1 / 8.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. Mapping the margins: Intersectional-
ity, identity politics, and violence against women of color. 
Stanford Law Review 43(6):1241– 1299. DOI: 10.2307/1229039.

Cummins, Neil, Morgan Kelly, and Cormac. Ó Gráda. 2016. Liv-
ing standards and plague in London, 1560– 1665. The Economic 
History Review 69(1):3– 34. https:// doi . org / 10 . 1111 / ehr . 12098.

Curtis, Daniel R., and Joris Roosen. 2017. The sex‐selective impact 
of the Black Death and recurring plagues in the Southern 
Netherlands, 1349– 1450. American Journal of Physical Anthro-
pology 164(2):246– 259. DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajpa . 23266.

DeWitte, Sharon, N. 2009. The effect of sex on risk of mortality 
during the Black Death in London, A.D. 1349- 1350. American 
Journal of Physical Anthropology 139:222– 252. DOI: 10 . 1002 
/ ajpa . 20974.

DeWitte, Sharon, N. 2010a. Age patterns of mortality during the 
Black Death in London, A.D. 1349- 1350. Journal of Archaeolog-
ical Science 37(12):3394– 3400. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . jas . 2010 . 08 . 006.

DeWitte, Sharon, N. 2010b. Sex differentials in frailty in Medie-
val England. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 
143(2):285– 297. DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajpa . 2316.

DeWitte, Sharon, N. 2014a. The anthropology of plague: Insights 
from bio archae ol o gi cal analyses of epidemic cemeteries. The 
Medieval Globe 1:97– 124. https:// scholarworks . wmich . edu / tmg 
/ vol1 / iss1 / 6

DeWitte, Sharon, N. 2014b. Differential survival among individ-
uals with active and healed periosteal new bone formation. In-
ternational Journal of Paleopathology 7:38– 44. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j 
. ijpp . 2014 . 06 . 001

DeWitte, Sharon, N. 2014c. Health in post- Black Death London 
(1350- 1538): Age patterns of periosteal new bone formation in 
a post- epidemic population. American Journal of Physical An-
thropology 155(2):260– 267. DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajpa . 22510.

DeWitte, Sharon, N. 2014d. Mortality risk and survival in the af-
termath of the Medieval Black Death. PLoS One 9(5):e96513. 
DOI: 10 . 1371 / journal . pone . 0096513.

DeWitte, Sharon, N. 2015. Setting the stage for medieval plague: 
Pre- Black Death trends in survival and mortality. American 
Journal of Physical Anthropology 158(3):441– 451. DOI: 10 . 1002 
/ ajpa . 22806.

DeWitte, Sharon, N. 2018. Stress, sex, and plague: Patterns of de-
velopmental stress and survival in pre‐ and post‐Black Death 
London. American Journal of Human Biology 30(1):e23073. 
DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajhb . 23073

DeWitte, Sharon N., and Gail Hughes- Morey. 2012. Stature and 
frailty during the Black Death: The effect of stature on risks 
of epidemic mortality in London, A.D. 1348- 1350. Journal of 
Archaeological Science 39(5):1412– 1419. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . jas . 2012. 
01 . 019.

DeWitte, Sharon N., and Maryanne Kowaleski. 2017. Black Death 
Bodies. Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of 
Ancient and Medieval Pasts 6:1– 37. http:// hdl . handle . net / 2027 
/ spo . 9772151 . 0006 . 001

DeWitte, Sharon N., and M. Christopher Stojanowski. 2015. The 
Osteological Paradox 20 years later: Past perspectives, future 
directions. Journal of Archaeological Research 23(4):397– 450. 
DOI: 10 . 1007 / s10814 - 015 - 9084 - 1.

DeWitte, Sharon N., and Amanda Wissler. 2022. Demographic 
and evolutionary consequences of pandemic diseases. Bioar-
chaeology International 6(1– 2):108. DOI: 10.5744/ bi.2020 . 0024.

DeWitte, Sharon N., and James W. Wood. 2008. Selectivity of 
Black Death mortality with respect to preexisting health. PNAS 
105(5):1436– 1441. DOI: 10 . 1073 / pnas . 0705460105.

Fagan, Brian M. 2000. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made His-
tory, 1300- 1850. Basic Books, New York.

Flagg, Anna, Damint Sharma, Larry Fenn, and Mike Stobbe. 
2020. Covid- 19’s toll on people of color is worse than we knew. 

https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/collections/other-collection-databases-and-libraries/centre-human-bioarchaeology/osteological-database/medieval-cemeteries/east-smithfield-black-death-medieval
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/collections/other-collection-databases-and-libraries/centre-human-bioarchaeology/osteological-database/medieval-cemeteries/east-smithfield-black-death-medieval
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/collections/other-collection-databases-and-libraries/centre-human-bioarchaeology/osteological-database/medieval-cemeteries/east-smithfield-black-death-medieval
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/collections/other-collection-databases-and-libraries/centre-human-bioarchaeology/osteological-database/medieval-cemeteries/east-smithfield-black-death-medieval
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/collections/other-collection-databases-and-libraries/centre-human-bioarchaeology/osteological-database/medieval-cemeteries/st-mary-graces
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/collections/other-collection-databases-and-libraries/centre-human-bioarchaeology/osteological-database/medieval-cemeteries/st-mary-graces
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/collections/other-collection-databases-and-libraries/centre-human-bioarchaeology/osteological-database/medieval-cemeteries/st-mary-graces
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/collections/other-collection-databases-and-libraries/centre-human-bioarchaeology/osteological-database/medieval-cemeteries/st-mary-graces
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MHpgQCVpDs77s15z0AKNnIOU-poSA3eL/view
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MHpgQCVpDs77s15z0AKNnIOU-poSA3eL/view
https://doi.org/10.4000/afriques.2084
https://doi.org/10.4000/afriques.2228
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2630035/
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/5
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/5
https://bearingwitness.github.io
https://bearingwitness.github.io
http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12098
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/6
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/6
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9772151.0006.001
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9772151.0006.001


Population Affinity and Plague in Fourteenth-Century London324

The Marshall Project. https:// www . themarshallproject . org 
/ 2020 / 08 / 21 / covid - 19 - s - toll - on - people - of - color - is - worse - than 
- we - knew. Accessed 7 June 2021.

Flewellen, Ayana O. 2017. Locating marginalized historical nar-
ratives at Kingsley Plantation. Historical Archaeology 51(1): 
71– 87. DOI: 10 . 1007 / s41636 - 017 - 0005 - 7.

Franklin, Maria. 2001. A Black feminist- inspired archaeology? 
Journal of Social Archaeology 1(1):108– 125. DOI: 10 . 1177 / 146 
96053010010010.

Franklin, Maria, Justin P. Dunnavant, Ayana Omilade Flewellen, 
and Alicia Odewale. 2020. The future is now: Archaeology and 
the eradication of anti- Blackness. International Journal of His-
torical Archaeology 24(4):753– 766. DOI: 10 . 1007 / s10761 - 020 
- 00577 - 1.

Fuentes, Agustín. 2020. A (bio)anthropological view of the 
COVID- 19 era midstream: Beyond the infection. Anthropology 
Now 12(1):24– 32. DOI: 10 . 1080 / 19428200 . 2020 . 1760635.

Fuentes, Agustín, and Carolyn Rouse. 2016. New articulations 
of biological difference in the 21st  century: A conversation. 
Anthropology Now 8(3):14– 25. DOI: 10 . 1080 / 19428200 . 2016 
. 1242907.

Galanaud, Pierre, Anne Galanaud, Patrick Giraudoux, and Henri 
Labesse. 2020. Mortality and demographic recovery in early 
post- Black Death epidemics: Role of recent emigrants in me-
dieval Dijon. PLoS One 15(1):e0226420. DOI: 10 . 1371 / journal 
. pone . 0226420.

Gamble, Julia A., Jesper L. Boldsen, and Robert D. Hoppa. 2017. 
Stressing out in medieval Denmark: An investigation of den-
tal enamel defects and age at death in two medieval Danish 
cemeteries. International Journal of Paleopathology 17:52– 66. 
DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . ijpp . 2017 . 01 . 001.

Gleize Yves, Fanny Mendisco Fanny, Marie- Hélène Pemonge, 
Christophe Hubert, Alexis Groppi, Bertrand Houix, et al. Early 
Medieval Muslim graves in France: First archaeological, an-
thropological and palaeogenomic evidence. PLoS One 2016; 
11(2):e0148583. DOI: 10 . 1371 / journal . pone . 0148583.

Godde, Kanya, Valerie Pasillas, and America Sanchez. 2020. Sur-
vival analysis of the Black Death: Social inequality of women 
and the perils of life and death in Medieval London. American 
Journal of Physical Anthropology 173(1):168– 178. DOI: 10. 1002/
ajpa . 24081.

Gomez, Michael. 2020. ‘The rise of race’ in the West African ar-
chive. Stanford Center for Medieval and Early Modern Stud-
ies. Keynote lecture ‘Race in the Archives.’ https:// cmems 
. stanford . edu / events / keynote - lecture - race - archives - michael 
- gomez - nyu. Accessed 9 November 2022.

Gourvennec, Michaël. 2019. A Medieval community faced with 
the second pandemic: The study of Black Death cemetery at 
16, Rue des Trente- Six Ponts, in Toulouse (France). Paper pre-
sented at the ‘The Long Black Death’: new perspectives, Uni-
versity of York. https:// hal . archives - ouvertes . fr / hal - 02298737. 
Accessed 9 November 2022.

Grainger, Ian, Duncan Hawkins, Lynne Cowal, and Richard Mi-
kulski. 2008. The Black Death Cemetery, East Smithfield, Lon-
don. Museum of London Archaeology Monograph 43. Museum 
of London Archaeology, London.

Grainger, Ian, and Christopher Phillpotts. 2011. The Cistercian 
Abbey of St. Mary Graces, East Smithfield, London. Museum of 
London Archaeology Monograph 44. Museum of London Ar-
chaeology, London.

Grauer, Anne L. 1993. Patterns of anemia and infection from me-
dieval York, England. American Journal of Physical Anthro-
pology 91(2):203– 213. DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajpa . 1330910206.

Gravlee, Clarence C. 2009. How race becomes biology: Embodi-
ment of social inequality. American Journal of Physical Anthro-
pology 139(1):47– 57. DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajpa . 20983.

Green, Monica, H. 2018. Putting Africa on the Black Death map: 
Narratives from genetics and history. Afriques 9. DOI: 10.4000/
afriques . 2125.

Guidi- Bruscoli, Francesco. 2016. London and its merchants in 
the Italian archives, 1380- 1530. In Medieval Merchants and 
Money: Essays in Honour of James L. Bolton, edited by M. Al-
len and M. Davies. Institute of Historical Research, London, 
pp. 113– 136.

Habib, Imtiaz  H. 2008. Black Lives in the English Archives, 
1500- 1677: Imprints of the Invisible. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 
Burlington, VT.

Haensch, Stephanie, Raffaella Bianucci, Michel Signoli, Minoar-
isoa Rajerison, Michael Schultz, Sacha Kacki, et  al. 2010. 
Distinct clones of Yersinia pestis caused the black death. PLoS 
Pathogens 6(10):e1001134. DOI: 10 . 1371 / journal . ppat . 1001134.

Hahn, Thomas. 2001. The difference the Middle Ages makes: Color 
and race before the modern world. Journal of Medieval and 
Early Modern Studies 31(1):1– 37. DOI:  10. 1215/10829636- 31- 1- 1.

Hall, Kim. 1995. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and 
Gender in Early Modern England. Cornell University Press, 
Ithaca, NY.

Harris, Carissa, M. 2019. The history of the wench: How a medi-
eval word meaning ‘servant’ or ‘child’ evolved to become a 
racist slur. Electric Literature. https:// electricliterature . com / a 
- history - of - the - wench/.

Harris, C.M. (2022). On Servant Women, Rape Culture, and 
Endurance. The Chaucer Review 57(4), 475–483. https://www 
.muse.jhu.edu/article/867759. 

Harris, Cheryl, L. 1993. Whiteness as property. Harvard Law 
Review 106(8):1707– 1791. DOI: 10 . 2307 / 1341787.

Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and 
Self- Making in Nineteenth- Century America. Oxford Univer-
sity Press on Demand, New York.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the 
Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. Venus in two acts. Small Axe 12(2):1– 14. 
DOI: 10 . 1215 /  - 12 - 2 - 1.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: 
Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, 
and Queer Radicals. WW Norton & Company, New York.

Hefner, Joseph T., and Kandus C. Linde. 2018. Atlas of Human 
Cranial Macromorphoscopic Traits. Academic Press, New York.

Heng, Geraldine. 2018a. The Invention of Race in the European 
Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Heng, Geraldine. 2018b. England and the Jews. Elements in Reli-
gion and Violence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Heng, Geraldine. 2021. Definitions of race: What is race? Defin-
ing and periodizing race as a transhistorical category. In A Cul-
tural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern 
Age, edited by Kimberley Anne Coles and Dorothy Kim. 
Bloomsbury, London, pp. 19– 32.

Hernæs, Per O., and Tore Iversen, eds. 2002. Slavery across Time 
and Space: Studies in Slavery in Medieval Europe and Africa. 
Department of History, University of Trondheim.

Hill Collins, Patricia. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social The-
ory. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.

Historic England. 2020. A brief introduction to Jewish cemeter-
ies. https:// heritagecalling . com / 2020 / 01 / 07 / a - brief - intro duc tion 
- to - jewish - cemeteries/. Accessed 29 April 2023.

Horrox, Rosemay. 1994. The Black Death. Manchester University 
Press, Manchester.

Hsy, Jonathan. 2021. Chaucer’s brown faces: Race, interpretation, 
adaptation. The Chaucer Review 56(4):378– 396. https:// www 
. muse . jhu . edu / article / 804399.

The Jewish Chronicle. 2019. Oxford College reburies 800- year- 
 old Jewish remains. https:// www . thejc . com / news / community 

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/08/21/covid-19-s-toll-on-people-of-color-is-worse-than-we-knew
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/08/21/covid-19-s-toll-on-people-of-color-is-worse-than-we-knew
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/08/21/covid-19-s-toll-on-people-of-color-is-worse-than-we-knew
https://cmems.stanford.edu/events/keynote-lecture-race-archives-michael-gomez-nyu
https://cmems.stanford.edu/events/keynote-lecture-race-archives-michael-gomez-nyu
https://cmems.stanford.edu/events/keynote-lecture-race-archives-michael-gomez-nyu
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02298737
https://electricliterature.com/a-history-of-the-wench/
https://electricliterature.com/a-history-of-the-wench/
https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/867759
https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/867759
https://heritagecalling.com/2020/01/07/a-brief-introduction-to-jewish-cemeteries/
https://heritagecalling.com/2020/01/07/a-brief-introduction-to-jewish-cemeteries/
https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/804399
https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/804399
https://www.thejc.com/news/community/union-of-jewish-students-honours-its-campus-stars-PWQuL5OARkmOukDwJTPcj


Redfern et al. 325

/ union - of - jewish - students - honours - its - campus - stars 
- PWQuL5OARkmOukDwJTPcj . Accessed 29 April 2023.

Kacki, Sacha, Lila Rahalison, Minoarisoa Rajerison, Ezio Ferroglio, 
and Raffaella Bianucci. 2011. Black Death in the rural cemetery 
of Saint- Laurent- de- la- Cabrerisse Aude- Languedoc, southern 
France, 14th century: Immunological evidence. Journal of Ar-
chaeological Science 38(3):581– 587. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . jas . 2010 . 10 . 012.

Keller, Marcel, Maria  A. Spyrou, Christiana  L. Scheib, Gun-
nar U. Neumann, Andreas Kröpelin, Brigitte Haas- Gebhard, 
et  al. 2019. Ancient Yersinia pestis genomes from across 
Western Europe reveal early diversification during the First 
Pandemic (541– 750). Proceedings of the National Academy of 
Sciences 116(25):12363– 12372. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . jas . 2010 . 10 . 012.

Kendall, Ellen  J., Janet Montgomery, Jane  A. Evans, Christina 
Stantis, and Victoria Mueller. 2013. Mobility, mortality, and 
the Middle Ages: Identification of migrant individuals in a 
14th  century Black Death cemetery population. American 
Journal of Physical Anthropology 150(2):210– 222. DOI: 10 . 1002 
/ ajpa . 22194.

Kennedy, Rebecca Futo, Roy C. Sydnor, and L. Max Goldman. 
2013. Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World. Hackett, 
Cambridge.

Kettle, Ann J. 1995. Ruined maids: Prostitutes and servant girls 
in later Medieval England. In Matrons and Marginal Women 
in Medieval Society, edited by Robert R. Edwards and Vickie L. 
Ziegler. Boydell Press, Woodbridge, pp. 19– 31.

Kim, Dorothy. 2021. The politics of the medieval preracial. Liter-
ature Compass 18(10):e12617. DOI: 10 . 1111 / lic3 . 12617.

Kim, Dorothy. 2022. The historiographies of premodern critical 
race studies and Jewish studies. Cambridge Journal of Postco-
lonial Literary Inquiry 9(10):139– 148.

Kim, Dorothy, and Kimberley Anne Coles. 2021. Introduction. In 
A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Mod-
ern Age, edited by Kimberley Anne Coles and Dorothy Kim. 
Bloomsbury, London, pp. 1– 19.

Klunk, Jennifer, Ana T. Duggan, Rebecca Redfern, Julia Gamble, 
Jesper L. Boldsen, G. Brian Golding, et al. 2019. Genetic resil-
iency and the Black Death: No apparent loss of mitogenomic 
diversity due to the Black Death in medieval London and 
Denmark. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 169(2): 
240– 252. DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajpa . 22194.

Lans, Aja M. 2020. Decolonize this collection: Integrating black 
feminism and art to re- examine human skeletal remains in 
museums. Feminist Anthropology 2(1):130– 142. DOI: 10 . 1002 
/ fea2 . 12027.

Larsen, Clark S. 2015. Bioarchaeology. Interpreting Behavior from 
the Human Skeleton. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Laster Pirtle, Whitney N. 2020. Racial capitalism: A fundamen-
tal cause of novel coronavirus (COVID- 19) pandemic inequities 
in the United States. Health Education & Behavior 189(11): 
1244– 1253. DOI: 10 . 1177 / 1090198120922942.

Laufenberg, Lynn  M. 2016. Who’s your Daddy? Slavery and 
contested patrimony in Florence. Paper presented at the Inter-
national Medieval Congress 2016, 4- 7 July 2016, Nottingham. 
https:// www . academia . edu / 26448672 / Speaking _ of _ Medieval 
_ Slavery _ Sessions _ at _ the _ IMC. Accessed 8 November 2022.

Lewis, Mary. 2016. Work and the adolescent in Medieval England 
(AD 900– 1550): The osteological evidence. Medieval Archaeol-
ogy 60:138– 171. DOI: 10 . 1080 / 00766097 . 2016 . 1147787.

Lumbley, Coral. 2019. The ‘dark Welsh’: Color, race, and alterity 
in the matter of Medieval Wales. Literature Compass 16:e12538. 
DOI: 10 . 1111 / lic3 . 12538.

Lutkin, Jessica. 2016. Settled or fleeting? London’s Medieval immi-
grant community revisited. In Medieval Merchants and Money: 
Essays in Honour of James L. Bolton, edited by M. Allen and M. 
Davies. Institute for Historical Research, London, pp. 137– 150.

Mbembé, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1):11– 40. 
https:// read . dukeupress . edu / public - culture / articleabstract / 15 
/ 1 / 11 / 31714 / Necropolitics.

McIntosh, Marjorie K. 1984. Servants and the household unit in 
an Elizabethan English community. Journal of Family History 
9:3– 23. DOI: 10 . 1177 / 036319908400900101.

McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the 
Cartographies of Struggle. (NED-New edition). University of 
Minnesota Press.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2015. Sylvia Wynter: On being human as 
praxis. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2014. Mathematics black life. The Black 
Scholar 44(2):16– 28. https:// www . jstor . org / stable / 10 . 5816 / black 
scholar . 44 . 2 . 0016.

McLean, Shay- Akil. 2019. Isolation by distance and the problem 
of the twenty- first century. Human Biology 91(2):81– 94. DOI: 
10 . 13110 / humanbiology . 92 . 3 . 04.

Miller, Joseph C. 2002. The historical contexts of slavery in Europe. 
In Slavery across Time and Space. Studies in Slavery in Medieval 
Europe and Africa, edited by Per O. Hernæs and Tore Iversen. 
Department of History, University of Trondheim, pp. 1– 57.

Mills, Charles W. 2020. The chronopolitics of racial time. Time 
& Society 29(2):297– 317.

Milner, George R., and Jesper L. Boldsen. 2012. Transition anal-
ysis: A validation study with known‐age modern American 
skeletons. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 148(1):98– 
110. DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajpa . 22047.

Mitchell, P. D., and M. Brickley, eds. 2017. Updated Guidelines to 
the Standards for Recording Human Remains. Charter Institute 
for Archaeologists, British Association for Biological Anthro-
pology and Osteoarchaeology. https:// www . babao . org . uk 
/ assets / Uploads - to - Web / 14 - Updated - Guidelines - to - the - Stan 
dards - for - Recording - Human - Remains - digital . pdf. Accessed 
8 November 2022.

Morgan, Jennifer L. 2021. Reckoning with Slavery. Duke Univer-
sity Press, Durham, NC.

Muhammad, Abdul- Aliy, and Lyra D. Monteiro. 2023. Finding 
ceremony for ancestors held in the Penn Museum and other 
colonial institutions. Sapiens, 10 May. https:// www . sapiens . org 
/ biology / finding - ceremony - morton - collection - repatriation/. 
Accessed 15 August 2023.

Nirenberg, David. 2015. Communities of Violence. Persecution of 
Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press, 
Oxford.

Nystrom, Kenneth C. 2014. The bioarchaeology of structural vi-
olence and dissection in the 19th‐century United States. Amer-
ican Anthropologist 116(4):765– 779. DOI: 10 . 1111 / aman . 12151.

Ogedegbe, Gbenga, Joseph Ravenell, Samrachana Adhikari, Mark 
Butler, Tiffany Cook, Fritz Francois, et al. 2020. Assessment of 
racial/ethnic disparities in hospitalization and mortality in pa-
tients with COVID- 19 in New York City. JAMA Network Open 
3(12):e2026881. DOI: 10 . 1001 / jamanetworkopen . 2020 . 26881.

Olszowy- Schlanger, Judith. 2015. Hebrew and Hebrew- Latin 
documents from Medieval England: A diplomatic and palaeo-
graphical study. Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium.

Otelle, Olivette. 2021. Black Europeans. Basic Books, New York.
Our Migration Story. n.d. Who was the Ipswich Man? https:// www 

. ourmigrationstory . org . uk / oms / the - ipswich - man. Accessed 29 
April 2023.

Paton, Alexis, Gary Fooks, Gaja Maestri, and Pam Lowe. 2020. 
Submission of Evidence on the Disproportionate Impact of 
COVID- 19, and the UK Government Response, on Ethnic Mi-
norities and Women in the UK. Aston University, Birmingham. 
https:// research . aston . ac . uk / en / publications / submission - of 
- evidence - on - the - disproportionate - impact - of - covid - 19. Ac-
cessed 8 November 2022.

https://www.thejc.com/news/community/union-of-jewish-students-honours-its-campus-stars-PWQuL5OARkmOukDwJTPcj
https://www.thejc.com/news/community/union-of-jewish-students-honours-its-campus-stars-PWQuL5OARkmOukDwJTPcj
https://www.academia.edu/26448672/Speaking_of_Medieval_Slavery_Sessions_at_the_IMC
https://www.academia.edu/26448672/Speaking_of_Medieval_Slavery_Sessions_at_the_IMC
https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/articleabstract/15/1/11/31714/Necropolitics
https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/articleabstract/15/1/11/31714/Necropolitics
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.44.2.0016
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.44.2.0016
https://www.babao.org.uk/assets/Uploads-to-Web/14-Updated-Guidelines-to-the-Standards-for-Recording-Human-Remains-digital.pdf
https://www.babao.org.uk/assets/Uploads-to-Web/14-Updated-Guidelines-to-the-Standards-for-Recording-Human-Remains-digital.pdf
https://www.babao.org.uk/assets/Uploads-to-Web/14-Updated-Guidelines-to-the-Standards-for-Recording-Human-Remains-digital.pdf
https://www.sapiens.org/biology/finding-ceremony-morton-collection-repatriation/
https://www.sapiens.org/biology/finding-ceremony-morton-collection-repatriation/
https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/the-ipswich-man
https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/the-ipswich-man
https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/publications/submission-of-evidence-on-the-disproportionate-impact-of-covid-19
https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/publications/submission-of-evidence-on-the-disproportionate-impact-of-covid-19


Population Affinity and Plague in Fourteenth-Century London326

Pfizenmaier, Sam, ed. 2016. Charterhouse Square: Black Death 
Cemetery and Carthusian Monastery, Meat Market and Sub-
urb. Crossrail Series 7. Crossrail and Museum of London Ar-
chaeology, London.

Phillips, Susie. 2022. Trading types: Mercantile multilingualism 
and race in the premodern virtual classroom presented at the 
University of Notre Dame: Conway Lectures, South Bend, In-
diana. https:// medieval . nd . edu / news - events / events / 2022 / 09 / 02 
/ the - 2022 - conway - lectures - susie - phillips - northwestern - trading 
- types - mercantile - multilingualism - and - race - in - the - premo 
dern - virtual - classroom/. Accessed 15 August 2023.

Phillips, Susie. 2023. Stableboys and schoolmasters: Blackness in 
the virtual classroom presented at the Race Before Race: Poet-
ics conference at the University of Arizona, Tempe, AZ. https:// 
www . youtube . com / watch ? v = xDWxZOKHdSc. Accessed 15 
August 2023.

Phillips, William  D.,  Jr. 1985. Slavery from Roman Times to 
the Early Transatlantic Trade. Manchester University Press, 
Manchester.

Phillips, William D., Jr. 2013. Slavery in Medieval and Early Mod-
ern Iberia. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.

Phipps, Teresa. 2020. Medieval Women and Urban Justice: Com-
merce, Crime and Community in England, 1300- 1500. Manches-
ter University Press, Manchester.

Plemons, A. 2022. The interaction between genetics and climate 
on craniofacial variation: examining the causative forces 
of  macromorphoscopic trait expression. Ph.D. dissertation, 
Michigan State University. DOI: 10.25335/3qk2-tq70.  Accessed 
21 November 2023.

Powers, Natasha. 2007. A rapid method for recording human 
skeletal data by Brian Connell and Peter Rauxloh. Museum 
of London. https:// www . museumoflondon . org . uk / application 
/ files / 6514 / 7308 / 7527 / RapidMethodRecordingManual . pdf. 
Accessed 8 November 2022.

Powers, Natasha. 2012. Human Osteology Method Statement. Mu-
seum of London. https:// www . museumoflondon . org . uk / appli 
cation / files / 4814 / 5633 / 5269 / osteology - method - statement - rev 
ised - 2012 . pdf. Accessed 8 November 2022.

Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. 2019. The depoliticized Saracen and 
Muslim erasure. Literature Compass 16:e12548. DOI: 10 . 1111 /
lic3 . 12548.

Rambaran- Olm, Mary. 2020. “Black Death” matters. https://
historianspeaks.org/f/black-death-matters--mary-rambaran 
-olm. Accessed 8 November 2022.

Ray, Michael. 2007. A Black slave on the run in thirteenth- century 
England. Nottingham Medieval Studies 51:111– 119. DOI: 10 . 1484 
/ j . Nms . 3 . 409.

Redfern, Rebecca, and Joseph T. Hefner. 2019. ‘Officially absent 
but actually present’: Bio archae ol o gi cal evidence for popula-
tion diversity in London during the Black Death, AD 1348- 50. 
In Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People, edited by M. L. Mant 
and A. Jaagumägi Holland. Elsevier, London, pp. 69– 114.

Redfern, Rebecca, and Joseph T. Hefner. 2021. Bio archae ol o gi-
cal and forensic perspectives on population diversity in the 
Medieval world: A case- study from London, England. In A 
Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern 
Age, edited by Kim Coles and Dorothy L. Kim. Bloomsbury 
Academic, London, pp. 73– 90.

Richard of Devizes. 1192. Chronicon de rebus gestis Ricardi 
Primi. http:// www . yorku . ca / inpar / devizes _ giles . pdf. Accessed 
8 November 2022.

Rose, Jerome C., Susan C. Antón, Arthur C. Aufderheide, Leslie 
Eisenberg, John B. Gregg, Ellis J. Neiburger, et al. 1991. Paleo-
pathology Association Skeletal Database Committee Recom-
mendations. Paleopathology Association, Detroit, MI.

Ross, Ann H., and Marin Pilloud. 2021. The need to incorpo-
rate human variation and evolutionary theory in forensic 
anthropology: A call for reform. American Journal of Physi-
cal Anthropology 176(4):672– 683. DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajpa . 24384.

Rossen, Lauren M., Amy M. Branum, Farida B. Ahmad, Paul 
Sutton, and Robert N. Anderson. 2020. Excess deaths associ-
ated with COVID- 19, by age and race and ethnicity— United 
States, January 26- October 3, 2020. Morbidity and Mortality 
Weekly Report 69(42):1522– 1527. DOI: 10 . 15585 / mmwr . mm69 
42e2.

Schuenemann, Verena  J., Kirsti Bos, Sharon DeWitte, Sarah 
Schmedes, Joslyn Jamieson, Alissa Mittnik, et al. 2011. Targeted 
enrichment of ancient pathogens yielding the pPCP1 plasmid 
of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death. Proceedings 
of the National Academy of Sciences U S A 108(38):E746– 752. 
DOI: 10 . 1073 / pnas . 1105107108.

Scorrer, Jessica, Katie E. Faillace, Alexzandra Hildred, Alexan-
dra J. Nederbragt, Morten B. Andersen, Marc- Alban Millet, 
et al. 2021. Diversity aboard a Tudor warship: Investigating 
the origins of the Mary Rose crew using multi- isotope analy-
sis. The Royal Society Open Science 8(5):292106. DOI: 10 . 1098 
/ rsos . 202106.

Scott, A. B., and R. D. Hoppa. 2019. The ice age with little ef-
fect? Exploring stress in the Danish Black Friars cemetery 
before and after the turn of the 14th century. International 
Journal of Paleopathology 26:157– 163. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . ijpp 
. 2018 . 12 . 004.

Sloane, Barney. 2011. The Black Death in London. History Press, 
London.

Spillers, Hortense. 1987. Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe: An Amer-
ican grammar book. Diacritics 17(2):65– 81. DOI: 10 . 2307 
/ 464747.

Spillers, Hortense. 2003. Black, White and in Color. Essays on 
American Literature and Culture. University of Chicago Press, 
Chicago.

Spradley, Kate, and Richard Jantz. 2021. What are we really esti-
mating in forensic anthropological practice, population affinity 
or ancestry? Forensic Anthropology 4(4):171– 180. DOI: 10.5744/
fa . 2021 . 0017.

Spyrou, Maria A., Marcel Keller, Rezeda I. Tukhbatova, Christi-
ana L. Scheib, Elizabeth A. Nelson, Aida Andrades Valtuena, 
et  al. 2019. Phylogeography of the second plague pandemic 
revealed through analysis of historical Yersinia pestis genomes. 
Nature Communications 10(1):4470. DOI: 10 . 1038 / s41467 - 019 
- 12154 - 0.

Spyrou, Maria A., Lyazzat Musralina, Guido A. Gnecchi Ruscone, 
Arthur Kocher, Pier- Georgio Borbone, Valeri I. Khartanovich, 
et al. 2022. The source of the Black Death in fourteenth- century 
central Eurasia. Nature 606:718– 724. DOI: 10 . 1038 / s41586 - 022 
- 04800 - 3.

Spyrou, Maria A., Rezeda I. Tukhbatova, Michal Feldman, Joanna 
Drath, Sacha Kacki, Julia Beltran de Heredia, et  al. 2016. 
Historical  Y. pestis genomes reveal the European Black 
Death as the source of ancient and modern plague pandem-
ics. Cell Host Microbe 19(6):874– 881. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . chom 
. 2016 . 05 . 012.

Stull, Kyra  E., Eric  J. Bartelink, Alexandra  R. Klales, Greg-
ory E. Berg, Michael W. Kenyhercz, Ericka N. L’Abbé, et al. 
2021. Commentary on: Bethard JD, DiGangi EA. Letter to 
the Editor— Moving beyond a lost cause: Forensic anthro-
pology and ancestry estimates in the United States. Journal 
of  Forensic Sciences 66(1):417– 420. DOI: 10 . 1111 / 1556 - 4029 
. 14616.

Supernant, Kisha, Jane E. Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Sonya Atalay, 
eds. 2021. Archaeologies of the Heart. Springer, New York.

https://medieval.nd.edu/news-events/events/2022/09/02/the-2022-conway-lectures-susie-phillips-northwestern-trading-types-mercantile-multilingualism-and-race-in-the-premodern-virtual-classroom/
https://medieval.nd.edu/news-events/events/2022/09/02/the-2022-conway-lectures-susie-phillips-northwestern-trading-types-mercantile-multilingualism-and-race-in-the-premodern-virtual-classroom/
https://medieval.nd.edu/news-events/events/2022/09/02/the-2022-conway-lectures-susie-phillips-northwestern-trading-types-mercantile-multilingualism-and-race-in-the-premodern-virtual-classroom/
https://medieval.nd.edu/news-events/events/2022/09/02/the-2022-conway-lectures-susie-phillips-northwestern-trading-types-mercantile-multilingualism-and-race-in-the-premodern-virtual-classroom/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDWxZOKHdSc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDWxZOKHdSc
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/application/files/6514/7308/7527/RapidMethodRecordingManual.pdf
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/application/files/6514/7308/7527/RapidMethodRecordingManual.pdf
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/application/files/4814/5633/5269/osteology-method-statement-revised-2012.pdf
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/application/files/4814/5633/5269/osteology-method-statement-revised-2012.pdf
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/application/files/4814/5633/5269/osteology-method-statement-revised-2012.pdf
https://historianspeaks.org/f/black-death-matters--mary-rambaran-olm
https://historianspeaks.org/f/black-death-matters--mary-rambaran-olm
https://historianspeaks.org/f/black-death-matters--mary-rambaran-olm
http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/devizes_giles.pdf


Redfern et al. 327

Sweany, Erin E. 2018. The cook’s ‘mormal’. In Writing on Skin in 
the Age of Chaucer, edited by Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin 
Rupp. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp.  119– 144. DOI: 10.1515/ 
9783110578133 - 007.

Taylor, Keeanga- Yamahtta. 2017. How We Get Free: Black Feminism 
and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books, Chicago.

Thrupp, Sylvia  L. 1957. A survey of the alien population of 
 England in 1440. Speculum XXXII:262– 273. https:// www . jstor 
. org / stable / pdf / 2849117 . pdf.

Thrupp, Sylvia L. 1989. The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 
1300- 1500. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Towle, Ian, and Joel D. Irish. 2020. Recording and interpreting 
enamel hypoplasia in samples from archaeological and palaeo-
anthropological contexts. Journal of Archaeological Science 
114:105077. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . jas . 2020 . 105077.

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 2022. Decolonizing Methodologies. Re-
search and Indigenous Peoples. 3rd ed. Bloomsbury, London.

Viswanathan, Gauri. 2014. Masks of Conquest. Literary Study and 
British Rule in India. 25th Anniversary Edition. Columbia Uni-
versity Press, Columbia.

Watkins, Rachel J. 2020. An alter(ed)native perspective on histor-
ical bioarchaeology. Historical Archaeology 54(1):17– 33. DOI: 
10 . 1007 / s41636 - 019 - 00224 - 5.

Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas viscus: Racializing Assem-
blages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. 
Duke University Press, Durham, NC.

Werner, Janelle. 2016. Living in suspicion: Priests and female ser-
vants in late Medieval England. Journal of British Studies 
55:658– 679. https:// www . jstor . org / stable / 26598925.

Whitaker, Cord. 2019. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism 
Emerged from Medieval Race- Thinking. Penn University Press, 
Philadelphia.

Williamson, Val. 2014. Evidence for Medieval Black history in 
England. http:// decodedpast . com / evidence - medieval - black 
- history - england / 5433. Accessed 12 December 2017.

Willmott, Hugh, Peter Townend, Diana Mahoney Swales, Hen-
drik Poinar, Katherine Eaton, and Jennifer Klunk. 2020. A 
Black Death mass grave at Thornton Abbey: The discovery 
and examination of a fourteenth- century rural catastrophe. 
Antiquity 94(373):179– 196. DOI: 10 . 15184 / aqy . 2019 . 213.

Wood, James W., George R. Milner, Henry C. Harpending, and 
Kenneth M. Weiss. 1992. The osteological paradox. Problems 
of inferring prehistoric health from skeletal samples. Current 
Anthropology 33(4):343– 370. https:// www . journals . uchicago 
. edu / doi / 10 . 1086 / 204084.

Yaussy, Samantha L., and Sharon N. DeWitte. 2018. Patterns of 
frailty in non- adults from medieval London. International 
Journal of Paleopathology 22:1– 7. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . ijpp . 2018 . 03 . 008.

Yaussy, Samantha L., Sharon N. DeWitte, and Rebecca C. Red-
fern. 2016. Frailty and famine: Patterns of mortality and 
physiological stress among victims of famine in medieval 
London. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 160(2): 
272– 283. DOI: 10 . 1002 / ajpa . 22954.

York Archaeology. 2019. St Stephen’s Church. 12th to 13th century 
African migrants? https:// www . yorkarchaeology . co . uk / new 
- blog / 2019 / 6 / 14 / st - stephens - church. Accessed 29 April 2023.

Ziegler, Philip. 2016. The Black Death. American Heritage Pub-
lishing, Rockville, MD.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2849117.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2849117.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26598925
http://decodedpast.com/evidence-medieval-black-history-england/5433
http://decodedpast.com/evidence-medieval-black-history-england/5433
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/204084
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/204084
https://www.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/new-blog/2019/6/14/st-stephens-church
https://www.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/new-blog/2019/6/14/st-stephens-church

	IDSTACKS 2
	IDSTACKS 4
	IDSTACKS 5
	IDSTACKS 6
	IDSTACKS 7
	IDSTACKS 9
	IDSTACKS 12
	IDSTACKS 13
	IDSTACKS 14
	IDSTACKS 15
	IDSTACKS 16
	IDSTACKS 17
	IDSTACKS 18
	IDSTACKS 19

