Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic.

The Black Death (1347-1352 CE) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe's population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic's causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, 'big data palaeoecology', which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death's mortality on a regional scale across Europe.

Making a Place for Space: A Demographic Spatial Perspective on Living Arrangements Among the Elderly in Historical Europe.

Much of the previous scholarship on the historical living arrangements of the aged has taken place without the benefit of large-scale harmonised census microdata and did not embrace even rudimentary forms of spatial modelling. Drawing on the pooled cross-sectional census microdata from the North Atlantic Population and Mosaic projects, we derive measures of intergenerational co-residence among the elderly for 277 regional populations from Catalonia to the Urals during the demographic ancien régime and thereafter. To examine the historical geography of living arrangements among the elderly, the spatial patterns in our data are assessed using formal tools of Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis.