Rats hitched rides with humans across Europe for thousands of years, and their bones now hold clues about the rise of medieval towns, the collapse of Roman trade networks, and the spread of plague pandemics. The problem is that historians and archaeologists have long blamed black and brown rats for transmitting the Black Death and later plague outbreaks, yet almost nothing is known about where and when these rodents actually lived in Europe, how their populations shifted with human settlement, or whether they were even present in large enough numbers to sustain the disease. RATTUS will systematically analyse rat remains from archaeological sites across Europe, using genetics, diet analysis, and radiocarbon dating on single bones to build the first detailed timeline of rat distribution over 2,500 years. If successful, the project could settle a long-running debate about whether rats were the primary drivers of historic plague pandemics or merely incidental victims. It will also provide a new proxy for tracking human economic activity—where rats thrived, trade and urbanisation likely followed. This is primarily fundamental historical and archaeological research with no immediate practical application, but understanding past disease dynamics could inform how we think about zoonotic disease emergence in modern cities and global trade networks.
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The black and brown rat are among the most globally successful commensal species, and the most significant for European history. Each has spread far beyond its native range in Asia by colonising niches around human settlements, likely reaching Europe in the Iron Age and 18th C respectively. The resulting association with shifting patterns of settlements and trade makes rats potentially valuable proxies for human history-if this anthrodependency can be understood. At the same time, rats have profound impacts on human societies as food pests and agents of disease, most notoriously-if controversially-implicated in historic plague pandemics including the 14th C Black Death. RATTUS aims to chart the history of rats in Europe from late prehistoric origins to the 19th C. While fundamentally archaeological, the project also draws on genetics, textual sources, and ecological modelling to move beyond documentation of dispersal history and build an understanding of underlying processes. How has human history shaped the distribution and ecology of rats over the past 2500 years? What in turn can rat remains tell us about key debates in human history, such as the post-Roman reconfiguration of economic and settlement systems and the emergence of medieval towns and trade? And what roles can rats really have played in the First and Second Plague Pandemics? Despite a recent revolution in plague history bringing unprecedented detail on the evolution and geographic spread of the bacterium itself, knowledge of the rodent populations most widely blamed for its transmission remains superficial, holding back understanding. Addressing these issues in detail has only recently become feasible thanks to advances in bioarchaeological methods: a single rat bone can now reveal taxonomic ID, genetic affinity, disease, diet, and date. The time is thus ripe for a systematic effort to unlock the potential of these most fascinating and significant of rodents as a source for-and factor in-human history
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