The Thousand-Year Graveyard

Scientists uncover a tortured history of disease and death from the Middle Ages onward
By Ann Gibbons
Badia Pozzeveri Churchyard, Altopascio, Italy—On a hot afternoon in July 2012, Giuseppe Vercellotti was digging up bones near the wall of an abandoned medieval church here, thinking about getting a cold drink, when he heard his students call his name. Faces glistening with sweat, they told him that they had found something strange buried half a meter down. Vercellotti took a look and saw a layer of lime, used in ancient times to squelch the stench of rotting corpses. When he tapped the hard layer with his trowel, it sounded hollow.
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- Introduction
- The Burials Begin
- The Worst Century
- Noble Secrets
- The Mass Grave
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Two weeks later, when he returned to his lab in Canada, he got a tiny package from Vercellotti. It held the tooth he had wanted so badly. Vercellotti had managed to excavate it in the season’s final week, and its DNA is now being analyzed.