A forgotten plague

Dysentery, or rödsot, as the disease was previously known in Sweden, continues to be a major scourge in developing countries. However, the disease has almost disappeared in the West. Very different circumstances prevailed before infectious diseases declined as some of the major causes of death during the 19th century. In that era, 10,000 people could die of dysentery in a single year in Sweden. The demographic consequences of dysentery in Sweden and the causes of the disease and its disappearance are discussed in this article. It is shown here that despite the devastating effects of dysentery epidemics, most government actions were targeted at cholera. Considerable regional and local differences are revealed as the disease is mapped over Sweden. Clusters of high mortality formed, and even in hard-hit Jönköping County some parishes were almost never affected. It becomes apparent that the outbreaks have been the result of complex interactions between different variables and have led to widespread disease of uneven and often epidemic proportions.

For the statistical analyses the digitized source material of the Demographic Data Base (DDB) at Umeå University has been used, containing statistical demographic data gathered from parishes from all over Sweden. Other sources drawn upon include published statistical data, reports from district medical officers, newspapers, parish registers, and maps.     

The Non-Geographer: Overlooked but not forgotten

This paper is concerned with epistemological and attitudinal problems encountered in communicating geographical concepts to non-geographers. It reflects a Canadian context and offers a case study of a group of non-geographers whose special needs are often overlooked: the teachers of social studies. An inductive approach, using systematic geography only as required in order to understand a case study, is found to be effective in building bridges for those new to the subject. The choice of sequence should be from the empirical to the theoretical, in which fieldwork fulfils a point of entry for non-geographers.     

The mystery of plague in medieval Iceland

This article is aimed at encouraging scholars to continue to take critical, interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the cause and scale of historic plague outbreaks. It does this by reinvestigating two recorded outbreaks of plague in Iceland in 1402–4 and 1494–5. It is argued that these were episodes of pneumonic plague, caused by Yersinia pestis, and that the likely mortality was no more than 25% of the population in both cases. This contrasts with the higher rates (50–60% and 30–50%) postulated elsewhere. Although it is recognised there are other explanations for plague in Iceland, greater caution needs to be taken in interpreting the direct and indirect evidence for its demographic effects. A lower mortality rate fits better with a less widespread and more fragmented epidemic. The numbers and types of Icelandic farms which might have been vacant during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries are given more detailed consideration than in previous accounts. ‘Farm abandonment’ in the fifteenth century was continually driven by a series of environmental and economic factors and need not be interpreted as a demographic collapse caused solely by the plague. Greater attention is also given to understanding how plague could have reached Iceland and the biological, ecological and sociological factors which might then have sustained it.     

The forgotten slaves of Tromelin (Indian Ocean): new geoarchaeological data

Here we present geoarchaeological results from Tromelin, a small 1-km² atoll in the Indian Ocean, looking to elucidate human–environment interactions following the wrecking of the l'Utile in 1761. Abandoned by their French crew, around 60 Madagascans were enforced to form a micro-society on this remote island for a 15-year period. Little, however, is known about the cultural and environmental adaptations the population made during their stay. This study focuses on sediment archives from Site 5, where GRAN/INRAP archaeological work in 2008 brought to light three rooms attributed to the survivor's living quarters. Particular emphasis is placed on the impacts of cyclonic storm surges, natural hazards that presented serious environmental risks to the long-term survival of the slaves. The small size of Tromelin renders it a particularly discrete unit of analysis for such a study. We have identified four chronostratigraphic units at the site. (1) Unit 4 constitutes coarse white sand incorporating rounded gravels and reworked head and branch corals. No anthropogenic material is attested. We attribute this unit to a storm layer preceding the 1761 occupation of Tromelin. (2) Unit 3 yielded a multiplicity of archaeological material and corresponds to the 18th century cultural layer. The unit varies in thickness from 10 to 40 cm. (3) Unit 2 constitutes a 20 to 40 cm sand sheet across much of Site 5 that we attribute to a powerful cyclone event. It forms an unconformable contact above unit 3 and can be divided into two distinct sub-units, 2a and 2b. Sub-unit 2a is characterised by an inverse grading of the sediments, constituting coarse sands at the base grading into rounded biogenic gravels in the upper part. This sedimentology is typical of increasing flow velocity and is diagnostic of a storm setup flow. The transition to sub-unit 2b marks the onset of the waning flow, characterised by a sharp fall in relative flow velocities. These overwash deposits buried much of the archaeological remains and have been critical to the preservation of the vestiges through to present-day. (4) Unit 1 corresponds to a layer of infill incorporating blocks of coral and cultural objects dating from the 19th to 20th centuries.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.