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Reply to ‘Reduction in grain pollen indicates population decline, but not necessarily Black Death mortality’

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 6, pages 1628–1629 (2022)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 05 September 2022

replying to: Daniel R. Curtis et al. Nature Ecology & Evolution https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01862-4 (2022)

In his thoughtful reply to our paper1, Daniel Curtis raises concerns not about the results of our analysis of pollen data from 261 sites from 19 modern-day European countries, but about how we interpreted our results. Following the principle of parsimony, our large-scale palaeoecological approach allowed us to roughly measure an otherwise obscure phenomenon, a historical mortality event. We empirically demonstrated that landscape change during the Black Death era was highly variable and that the Black Death did not uniformly, or widely, lead to arable contraction and landscape rewilding. Spatial heterogeneity in mortality, as opposed to universal mass mortality, is one of the explanations of this unexpected pattern. We posited that this revealed ‘the significance of cultural, ecological, economic, societal and climatic factors that mediated the dissemination and impact of the disease’. We established these interregional differences for 16 of our study regions (including Italy) for intervals of 100, 50 and 25 years, meaning that the trajectories in land use we discerned were visible in the short and longer term, and we used our results not to make a regionally specific argument but rather to support the opinion that the Black Death’s demographic impact was irregular and not, as commonly supposed, unfailingly catastrophic. A European mortality of approximately 50 or 65%2 is incommensurate with our findings.

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Fig. 1: Hearth tax payments and cereals collected in northern Lazio during the time of the Black Death.

References

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Max Planck Independent Research Group-Palaeo-Science & History Group (A.I., A.M., C.V.), Georgetown Environmental Initiative (T.N.) and Volkswagen Foundation Freigeist Fellowship Dantean Anomaly (M.B.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany

    A. Izdebski, C. Vignola & A. Masi

  2. Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Krakow, Poland

    A. Izdebski

  3. Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, Leipzig, Germany

    M. Bauch

  4. University of Bialystok, Bialystok, Poland

    P. Guzowski

  5. University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

    S. Mensing

  6. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

    A. M. Mercuri

  7. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    T. Newfield

  8. University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy

    G. Piovesan

  9. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    L. Sadori, C. Vignola & A. Masi

Authors
  1. A. Izdebski
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Contributions

A.I., M.B., S.M., T.N. and G.P. designed and contributed to the manuscript, which was drafted by A.I. with the support of M.B. P.G., A.M.M., L.S., C.V. and A.M. contributed to the discussion and the writing of the text.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to A. Masi.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Sandra Nogue and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Izdebski, A., Bauch, M., Guzowski, P. et al. Reply to ‘Reduction in grain pollen indicates population decline, but not necessarily Black Death mortality’. Nat Ecol Evol 6, 1628–1629 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01863-3

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