Ancient Bahraini mass graves reveal complex story

Things are not always what they seem. At least that’s what academics from the University of Auckland discovered during research into an ancient mass grave in Bahrain.

Near the village of Karzakkan, on Bahrain’s western coast, lies a vast landscape of burial mounds called the Madinat Hamad 3 or DS3, containing large numbers of dead dating back to the Tylos period (c. 330 to 600 AD).

Tylos was the name for the Hellenistic era of Bahrain – an archipelago of 33 natural islands – during a time of immense prosperity, where it served as a central maritime trading hub for pearls and textiles in the Persian Gulf.

Within two otherwise normal-looking burial mounds were burial chambers containing extraordinary numbers of dead. At least 149 people were interred in one chamber and 86 in another. Many of the dead were children.

Principal investigator bioarchaeologist Professor Judith Littleton says the burials started in an orderly fashion, “but by the end, the dead had been laid in disorder among other decomposing bodies, signalling a community in distress”.
 

Working on the current project are Littleton and University of Auckland colleagues Dr Caitlin Smith (Anthropology) and Associate Professor Lisa Bailey (Ancient History).

The chambers themselves were excavated 40 years ago, and Littleton did her own analysis of the people buried in these chambers during her PhD research at that time. For this paper, her original data was reanalysed with new questions in mind: are these chambers unusual for DS3 and when did they occur?

Smith says after new radiocarbon analyses during her PhD research in 2019, it became clear that the timing of these deaths happened to coincide with the Justinianic Plague (c. 541 to750 AD).

This was the first historically documented pandemic, the bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, a zoonotic disease maintained in wild rodent populations.

This plague devastated the Mediterranean basin, particularly the Byzantine Empire under Emperor Justinian I, killing an estimated 20 to 50 million people and causing widespread economic, social and military disruption.

So it was tempting to assume that the mass deaths were caused by the plague, as many in the field had done up to the Auckland team’s most recent discovery.
“Our research suggests a far more complex and locally shaped disaster,” says Littleton.

“Drawing on previous records, alongside new analyses, including radiocarbon dating, burial practices, demographic profiles, and skeletal evidence, our team did identify an episode of catastrophic mortality. Yet these same lines of evidence don’t support Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for plague, as the cause.”

Instead, she says, their findings point to a “perfect storm” of overlapping hazards.

“Environmental uncertainty, social disruption, and an outbreak of another disease, possibly epidemic malaria, may have combined to produce a deadly crisis at the same time the larger plague pandemic was unfolding.”

These findings challenge long-held assumptions about how pandemics unfold and how their impacts are recorded in the archaeological record.

“Even when mass graves coincide with recorded outbreaks, they can’t be assumed to be related to a single pathogen,” says Littleton.

“These unusual chambers, within otherwise normal mounds in Bahrain, tell an important story. Catastrophes are often not driven by a single cause but by cascading crises that converge in time and place, and they can create space for a range of pathogens.”

The team’s research also highlights the enduring value of legacy collections, she says.

“By revisiting material excavated decades ago with new methods and new questions, we uncovered evidence of a catastrophe in a small Bahraini community 1,500 years ago that might otherwise have remained invisible.”

It also shows how epidemics can be exacerbated or arise from other local crises, a current example being the cholera and polio outbreaks in South Sudan resulting from conflict and mass displacement.

The team wishes to thank the staff of the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities for their continued support of Littleton and Smith’s research in the Kingdom of Bahrain, particularly H.E. Sh. Khalifa bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa and Dr Salman Almahari.

Evidence for catastrophe at the time of the Plague of Justinian on Bahrain: right time, different disaster by Judith Littleton, Caitlin Bonham Smith and Lisa Bailey is published in the May 2026 issue of Royal Society Open Science.