'They basically used these dried-up wells just to throw people in': 43 skeletons found in Roman-era well may be evidence of deadly plague

BERLIN — Nearly four dozen skeletons recovered from a deep well in the Croatian city of Osijek may be the remains of people who perished during the historic Plague of Cyprian that ravaged the Roman Empire in the mid-third century A.D.

"We have a whole bunch of these used Roman-period wells that were dug in antiquity," Mario Novak, a bioarchaeologist at the Institute for Archaeological Research in Zagreb, told Live Science. "They basically used these dried-up wells just to throw people in — either from battle or from epidemics."

Novak presented new research on the enigmatic burial Aug. 6 at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting in Berlin. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The burial was excavated in 2008 near a Roman necropolis in Osijek, which was founded by Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 133. At the time, the city was part of the province of Pannonia and named Mursa. The c...