The End of Plague in Europe

At the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES, University of Oslo), a group of biologists has been working for decades to disentangle the complex mechanisms of plague epizootics and epidemics in places where extant wild rodent reservoirs are present. These questions have been approached through ecological and climatic studies, mathematic modeling, as well as genomics and epidemiology. In 2013–2018, the Centre hosted the ERC-project MedPlag, which explored past pandemics through the lenses of additional disciplines, like archaeogenomics (ancient DNA), anthropology, archaeology, and evolution, always against the background of historical information. Here, we reflect on the end of plague in Europe based on the most recent studies on plague carried out in these different disciplines.