Enlarge (credit: Guy Bar-Oz) Ancient trash heaps recently yielded some clues about how the Plague of Justinian, part of a one-two punch with volcanic climate havoc, devastated commercial farming at the fringes of the Byzantine Empire in the 540s CE. They tell us a lot about the ancient Byzantine world, but they also suggest how archaeologists might someday unearth the story of the COVID-19 pandemic from the layers of stuff we're dumping into landfills in 2020. Gaza wine and Byzantine pilgrims For thousands of years, people survived in Israel's arid Negev Highlands by farming enough grain to feed their families and enough grapes to make their own wine.