New Roman boundary stone uncovered

[Imperial Dave]

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a63499097/roman-tetrarchy-boundary-stone/

Hopefully of interest...

[Ian61]

Interesting. We seem to be finding evermore evidence that parts of the empire such as Britain were more populous than thought a century ago. Are we now seeing the same thing in the east. This counters another thread doubting the effects of plague that would ravage the empire and surrounding areas a few centuries after this.

[Imperial Dave]

Indeed. I think in general plagues really were catastrophic and relatively frequent occurrences. The issue is that we only have a few lines here and there detailing them...

[DBS]

I think the problem might be that plagues may have been more localised than we now realise.

I live on the southernmost tip of Greater London.  Nowadays we are a London borough, but originally we were a village in the foothills of the North Downs, and we are still a Surrey post code.  We have continuous church records back to 1538.  In 1665, the village was completely untouched by the great plague, and indeed was seen as a safe haven.  However, in 1645, pestilence quickly carried off five or six people - a vagrant woman, name unknown, came to the village, already sick.  The curate's wife tended her.  The woman died; a couple of other people died; the curate's wife died, her husband writing a short eulogy in the records; then the handwriting changes and the next entry records the curate's death.

My point is that the great urban plague, so well recorded, left a village some 13 miles south of then London's limits untouched, but, in relative terms, suffered a fairly devastating outbreak of sickness twenty years earlier that carried off five locals in a week yet would be unrecorded if it were not for the burial register.  Thus, I suspect we are conscious, because of the bias in our urbanised sources, of plagues devastating big, unhealthy population centres such as Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, etc, but that given such a high proportion of the population actually lived in rural or small town contexts, perhaps the overall death toll was not as high as we think.  Even more so if villagers a few miles from the great cities went untouched, because of a sporadic nature of contagion and spread?

[Imperial Dave]

True. Regional affects in antiquity might have been more varied than in a highly mobile modern context.

[Nick Harbud]

This reminds me of various disease outbreaks that I witnessed in construction camps located in diverse and semi-remote parts of the world.  Such establishments typically house anything from a few hundred to tens of thousands of residents and easily fall into the category of isolated communities analogous to the villages of previous ages.

In one influenza outbreak, a project manager insisted upon coming in to work for several days before his generally yellow demeanour and complete breakdown of higher brain function persuaded him to take to his sick bed.  However, by this time he had passed on his sickness to others, pole-axing his entire project management team and two thirds of the contractor's staff.

There are, of course, other disease vectors.  For example, the tour of a camp canteen by the project director coincided with one of cooks failing to observe good personal hygiene, leaving many with any earth-shattering dose of Montezuma's Revenge.  The project was rudderless for several days.

And as for the dormitory whose residents tended to share everything from alcoholic beverages to female companions.  Well, I leave this to your imaginations.

[Imperial Dave]