Byzantium · AD 541–750 · Jerash, Jerash Governorate, Jordan
Justinianic Plague mass grave confirmed at Roman hippodrome in Jerash, Jordan
Bodies were laid in the disused arena within days, and the University of South Florida team says the dead were part of a mobile population within the city.
Peer-reviewed paper
Jerash, Jordan A mass grave in the old hippodrome at Jerash, in northern Jordan, is the first mass grave from the Justinianic Plague confirmed by both archaeology and genetics. That is the conclusion of a team led by the University of South Florida (USF).
The team's study is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. It finds that the dead were placed in the abandoned arena within a matter of days. They were part of a mobile population that was integrated into the wider urban community.
The Justinianic Plague was the first known outbreak of bubonic plague in the Mediterranean world. It began in AD 541, in the reign of the emperor Justinian I. It recurred until around 750 and killed millions in the Byzantine Empire.
Byzantine historians described enormous death tolls. The team says those accounts had no confirmed archaeological counterpart until now.
The research was led by Rays H. Y. Jiang, associate professor at the USF College of Public Health. The first author of the paper is Karen Hendrix, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney.
Colleagues from USF's Global Health Infectious Disease Research Center took part. So did colleagues from USF's departments of anthropology, molecular medicine and history. A DNA laboratory at Florida Atlantic University also took part.
The paper is the third in a series. The team's two earlier articles concentrated on identifying Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. The new study turns to the people in the grave: who they were, how they lived, and what death in a pandemic looked like inside a real city.
The grave was filled within a few days
Jerash is the ancient Gerasa, one of the cities of the Decapolis. Its Roman hippodrome lies near the southern entrance to the old town. By the time of the plague, the hippodrome was an abandoned civic space.
The researchers label the grave Mass Grave W2. The bodies in it were deposited quickly, over a few days. They lie on top of layers of broken pottery.
The team describes this as a single mortuary event. An ordinary city cemetery grows gradually over time, one burial after another. The Jerash grave records many deaths at once.
The researchers say this gives direct evidence of deaths on a large scale. It matches what the written sources describe.
The epidemic made mobile people visible
The grave also helps with a long-standing puzzle. Historical and genetic data show a great deal of movement and population mixing over time. Yet many ordinary burials suggest communities that were largely local and settled.
The team's explanation is that both pictures are correct. Migration and trade under the empires often happened gradually, over generations. The newcomers blended into everyday communities, so their movement is hard to detect in a normal cemetery.
A fast-spreading epidemic can concentrate such people in one place at one moment. That makes long-term movement visible all at once.
According to the bioarchaeological and genetic evidence, the individuals in the Jerash grave belonged to a mobile population. That population was part of the wider urban community.
In normal times their presence would have been diluted among everyone else. The epidemic killed them at the same moment, and they ended up in one grave.
Jiang argues that researchers gain by tying the biological evidence from the bodies to their archaeological setting. Doing so lets them see how disease affected people within their social and environmental surroundings.
Jiang describes pandemics as social as well as biological events. The study, Jiang says, shows how disease intersects with daily life, mobility and the vulnerability of particular groups.
Size of the grave and plague wave not given
The published reports on the study do not give the number of people in the grave. Nor do they say which wave of the plague, within the period from 541 to 750, killed them.
The paper appears in volume 186 of the Journal of Archaeological Science, dated February 2026.
Sources
- The first mass grave of the Justinianic Plague discovered in Jordan at the ancient hippodrome of Jerash, rewriting the history of the pandemic (La Brújula Verde)
Paper: Karen Hendrix, Swamy R. Adapa et al., Bioarchaeological signatures during the Plague of Justinian (541–750 CE) in Jerash (ancient Gerasa), Jordan. Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 186, February 2026, 106473. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2026.106473
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