Pregnancy complications are poorly represented in the archeological record, despite their importance in contemporary and ancient societies. While excavating a Byzantine cemetery in Troy, we discovered calcified abscesses among a woman's remains. Scanning electron microscopy of the tissue revealed 'ghost cells', resulting from dystrophic calcification, which preserved ancient maternal, fetal and bacterial DNA of a severe infection, likely chorioamnionitis. Gardnerella vaginalis and Staphylococcus saprophyticus dominated the abscesses. Phylogenomic analyses of ancient, historical, and contemporary data showed that G. vaginalis Troy fell within contemporary genetic diversity, whereas S. saprophyticus Troy belongs to a lineage that does not appear to be commonly associated with human disease today. We speculate that the ecology of S. saprophyticus infection may have differed in the ancient world as a result of close contacts between humans and domesticated animals. These results highlight the complex and dynamic interactions with our microbial milieu that underlie severe maternal infections.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 359. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 03 December 2025.
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#109,244
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Outputs from eLife
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Outputs of similar age from eLife
#10
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Altmetric has tracked 32,780,952 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 18,783 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 30.4. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 358 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 97% of its contemporaries.
