Black Death Exonerations

In another example of why I like archaeologists more than most all other social scientists, Archaeologists have now exonerated rats for their alleged part in the spread of the black death.

"The evidence just isn't there to support it," said Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in London. "We ought to be finding great heaps of dead rats in all the waterfront sites but they just aren't there. And all the evidence I've looked at suggests the plague spread too fast for the traditional explanation of transmission by rats and fleas. It has to be person to person – there just isn't time for the rats to be spreading it."

I'm pleased by this, not because I'm a fan of rats, though they've never done me any wrong.  The reason I'm pleased is that archaeologists are taking new data about something that was thought to be a closed case and using that new data to refine their conclusions, rather than the other way around.  It's the way things are supposed to work in the world of scientific inquiry.

Mortality continued to rise throughout the bitterly cold winter, when fleas could not have survived, and there is no evidence of enough rats.
Black rat skeletons have been found at 14th-century sites, but not in high enough numbers to make them the plague carriers, he said.

To re-iterate my point: scientists found evidence to exonerate two of the most hated pests in history of one of the worst disasters to hit human kind, and changed their conclusions rather than explaining it away.  This is  more amazing than I can say (and how sad is it that rational behavior on the part of scientists is impressive?).