ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Archaeol.
Sec. Human Bioarchaeology and Paleopathology
This article is part of the Research TopicUnderstanding Past Communal Health: Social Responses to Communal Health in the PastView all 3 articles
Closer to godliness: a contextual study of osteoarchaeological and spatial patterns of diseased individuals in medieval Danish cemeteries
Provisionally accepted
Saige Kelmelis1*
Vicki Rytoft Kristensen2
Lars Agersnap Larsen3Maria Knudsen4Lene Mollerup5Lone Seeberg6
Dorthe Dangvard Pedersen2- 1University of South Dakota, Vermillion, United States
- 2Syddansk Universitet, Odense, Denmark
- 3Viborg Museum, Viborg, Denmark
- 4Museum VEST, Ribe, Denmark
- 5Skanderborg Museum, Skanderborg, Denmark
- 6Horsens Museum, Horsens, Denmark
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Medieval Danish populations (c. 1050-1536 AD) faced numerous infectious diseases, including leprosy and tuberculosis, that shaped modern perceptions of medieval health crises. While previous studies explored disease spread and mitigating factors like leprosaria, it remains unclear how health status influenced burial treatment and placement within church cemeteries. Cemetery analyses may also clarify whether urban-rural mortality differences were affected by proximity to care institutions. This study integrates paleoepidemiology and spatial archaeology to examine health and death treatments in 939 adults from three urban and two rural medieval Danish collections. Bone involving disease prevalence was estimated using probabilistic estimates of sensitivity and specificity from skeletal indicators of leprosy and tuberculosis, enabling spatial comparisons of infected and noninfected individuals across cemeteries. Differential survivorship and mortality hazards were evaluated using Kaplan-Meier and Cox regression analyses. Results showed no distinct patterns of clustering of skeletons with positive disease states that suggest specific treatment of disease sufferers in death, but notable variation was found in burial status distribution and survivorship between cemeteries with high status individuals having lower mortality. The absence of leprosy sufferers in urban cemeteries reinforces leprosaria's selective effect on burial placement, while tuberculosis prevalence was high across all cemeteries, indicating no differential treatment. No significant survivorship differences existed between those with and without leprosy, whereas tuberculosis-positive individuals had significantly higher survivorship than non-lesioned peers (p<0.001). This study demonstrates medieval Danes' complex relationship with disease, status, and burial practices.
Keywords: Burial practices, Social topography, spatial topography, Leprosy, Tuberculosis, Mortality, Paleoepidemiology, medieval Denmark
Received: 04 Sep 2025; Accepted: 26 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kelmelis, Kristensen, Larsen, Knudsen, Mollerup, Seeberg and Pedersen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Saige Kelmelis
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