The main aim of the EUROpest project is to understand how socio-ecological systems shaped the spread and impact of epidemics in late medieval and early modern Europe. To do so, EUROpest presents a new interdisciplinary and collaborative paradigm that studies plague within its climatic, cultural, demographic, economic, ecological, and pathogenic contexts. Drawing on an eco-bio-social theoretical model (see Fig. 1), EUROpest will investigate how factors such as climate, malnutrition, poor health, and inequality influenced the spread to and severity of plague across different European communities. The project integrates archival source analysis with archaeology, archaeogenetics, palaeoecology, and palaeoclimatology and human-supervised machine-learning to identify to understand epidemic disease outbreaks in the past to inform nuanced and realistic scenarios of and interventions for future pandemics.

Born from years of interdisciplinary collaboration, EUROpest aims to articulate the complex ways in which social-ecological systems  shape epidemics. It builds on resilience and actor-network theories to advance its own eco-bio-social paradigm that embraces a multi-causal understanding of disease transmission and disease impacts on human societies and ecosystems.

While striving to develop and validate a general theoretical model, it takes the well-documented and highly diverse world of late medieval and early modern Europe as its laboratory – investigating its interconnected climatic, cultural, demographic, economic, ecological, and pathogenic history. With regard to the latter, EUROpest assumes malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis and enteric diseases were major components of a disease baseline over which the most devastating disease, plague (Y. pestis), occurred.

EUROpest will carry out regional case studies – from Spain to Lithuania, Greece to England – selected on the basis of available and procurable written, scientific and archaeological data. It will holistically consider the contexts of plague outbreaks identified in those regions, to understand how context both facilitated outbreaks and also shaped them, and their short- and medium-term impacts.

EUROpest combines archival source analysis with archaeology, archaeogenetics, paleoecology and paleoclimatology, and subjects case studies to novel human-supervised machine-learning to identify the causal role of factors influencing regional outbreaks. This is demonstrated in the EUROpest theoretical model (Fig. 1).

As the contemporary imagination is guided in its understanding of epidemic disease by the outbreaks of the past, EUROpest’s contribution will be critical to developing more nuanced and realistic scenarios of future pandemics, academic as well as popular audiences. With EUROpest PIs already engaging policy makers, the mathematical precision of the eco-bio-social analysis EUROpest proposes will help design more successful and targeted interventions for future pandemic response.

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