The COVID-19 pandemic is firing up our imagination about how to account for the past epidemics in archaeological contexts. This essay is a reflection on some of the historical cases of epidemic outbreaks in Yorùbá history, and what we can learn from social memory, oral traditions, and recent eyewitness accounts on how microbial attacks were managed in ancestral Yorùbá urban centers. Malignant microbes usually thrive in the kind of settlement configurations—dense towns and cities—that supported the preferred sociopolitical organization among the Yorùbá for over a millennium. Sacred groves were incorporated into the ancestral Yorùbá urban planning. They served many roles, including as isolation centers for managing epidemic outbreaks. Such isolation sites are difficult to identify in archaeological contexts without the aid of historical sources. However, contemplating how these special spaces were embedded in the past Yorùbá cultural lives could broaden our imagination of social regeneration processes in times of crisis (e.g., infectious disease).

中文翻译：

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管理祖传约鲁巴城镇的流行病：作为隔离点的“圣林”

COVID-19 大流行激发了我们对如何在考古背景下解释过去流行病的想象力。这篇文章是对 Yorùbá 历史上一些流行病爆发的历史案例的反思，以及我们可以从社会记忆、口述传统和最近目击者关于如何在祖传的 Yorùbá 城市中心管理微生物攻击的叙述中学到的东西。恶性微生物通常在那种聚居结构——密集的城镇和城市——中茁壮成长，这些结构支撑了约鲁巴人一千年以来首选的社会政治组织。圣林被纳入祖传的约鲁巴城市规划。他们担任了许多角色，包括作为管理流行病爆发的隔离中心。如果没有历史资料的帮助，这些隔离地点很难在考古环境中识别。