‘Bone Biographies’ Reconstruct Lives of Medieval Cambridge Commoners

Archaeologists from the University of Cambridge have compiled a series of “bone biographies” that shed new light on residents of medieval Cambridge. The project’s website, called After the Plague, chronicles the lives of 16 ordinary individuals who lived between the 11th and 15th centuries. This period notably includes the bubonic plague, which hit the city between 1348 and 1349.

“Our team used techniques familiar from studies such as Richard III’s skeleton, but this time to reveal details of unknown lives—people we would never learn about in any other way,” says John Robb, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, in a statement. In other words, these are commoners: townsfolk, friars, merchants and scholars, among others.

Since the project began in 2016, researchers with the University of Cambridge have been working to pair historical evidence with personal narrative. “We have to humanize people we study because we have trouble relating to things that are alien,” Robb told the Washington Post’s Peter Holley in 2017. “We gravitate to familiarity.”

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