Combinatorial covers and vanishing of cohomology

We use a Mayer-Vietoris-like spectral sequence to establish vanishing results for the cohomology of complements of linear and elliptic hyperplane arrangements, as part of a more general framework involving duality and abelian duality properties of spaces and groups. In the process, we consider cohomology of local systems with a general, Cohen-Macaulay-type condition. As a result, we recover known vanishing theorems for rank-1 local systems as well as group ring coefficients, and obtain new generalizations.