So here's why I think this much-hyped paper - "The Justinianic Plague: An Inconsequential Pandemic?" is deeply wrong. This matters because its approach is superficially empirical and quantitative, but the data fundamentally doesn't speak to the problem they want it to.
1) Literary texts don't talk much or at all about the Justinianic Plague, they say, and those that do are unreliable. Well, for most of the region in question, there are no literary texts that could speak to plague. None. Zero. They don't exist.
2) The symptoms the texts do describe aren't necessarily plague. The same thing goes for the Black Death, which was only firmly identified as yersinia pestis a decade ago; there were detailed cases for other diseases as the cause as recently as 2004.
3) Plague had no discernible economic effects, as measured via coinage and Egyptian estate revenues. As we know from the Black Death of the 14th century, the economic consequences were complex, varied by social strata, and were often paradoxical - i.e. more coinage per capita.
4) Inscriptions reveal continuity. This one is just weird; why would you expect people to stop inscribing things because of recurrent waves of plague? The epigraphic habit isn't a proxy for population.
5) Land use doesn't speak to mass depopulation. Using the Black Death as a parallel here is deeply misleading, because the land use patterns were so different prior to the epidemic. There's no reason to think anthropogenic pressure on the landscape would shift in similar ways.
5b) Prior to the Black Death: extremely high population near to the edge of carrying capacity, lots of marginal land under cultivation; prior to JP: already reduced population, lots of available land. Why would mass mortality cause similar outcomes with such different conditions?
6) There aren't enough plague pits, and the genomic evidence doesn't speak to prevalence. Again, weird; they're expecting the genomic evidence to answer questions it's not capable of speaking to at this point, and you don't trip over late antique plague pits every day.
7) Conclusion: The authors went out and assembled a bunch of superficially quantitative evidence without thinking hard enough about what it can and can't say, and about the possibilities and perils of comparison with the Black Death.
8) This paper is the rough equivalent of taking a broken lawnmower to the Apple Store and then concluding that the techs can't fix anything because they don't do lawnmowers at the Apple Store.
9) More serious, the authors mischaracterize the maximalist position they're arguing against, especially Harper's "Fate of Rome." He never says the Justinianic Plague ended the Roman Empire; it was one of a series of contemporaneous factors in the mid-6th century.
10) Empirical, data-driven work is possible for Late Antiquity. I did it myself for my doctoral dissertation - not flawlessly, by any means, and I'm open to critiques - but fundamental to any project of this kind is understanding the blind spots in your data. The authors failed.
11) Now, you might say, but they assembled a bunch of different data sets! Why don't any of them show unequivocal mass plague mortality? Well, more of the wrong kind of data (and insufficient quantities at that) isn't going to help just because you have more of it.
12) Just because you have data doesn't mean your data is good; it doesn't mean your data can answer the questions you're posing to it; and mischaracterizing your opponents' arguments is a bad look.
13) The more productive approach here would be looking at the (rich! interesting! full of possibilities!) data the authors assembled and asking more answerable, defined questions of it. But that's for other historians of late antiquity to do.
And that's enough on the Justinianic Plague for today. Was it a big deal? I think so, as part of a combination of bad things (mostly climatic) that happened in the middle of the 6th century and helped keep populations lower for a few centuries afterward.
