Ancient Roman Infant Burials

TW: deceased infants; infant burial

There is so much that archaeology cannot tell us about the dead. We have piles of bones from the Late Roman and Early Medieval periods in Britain, artfully arranged, oddly located, age-specific, and unusually accompanied. But what the internment of the dead actually meant to the living is ultimately inaccessible to us.

Infant burial is a case in point. It used to be thought that dead babies from the Roman period in Britain were unimportant to their communities: the under one-year olds were often placed away from adult cemeteries, and archaeologists thought this meant that these very young dead were not considered part of their societies.

However, newer interpretations argue that the infants were in fact critical members of their Roman communities. Historians point out that many of the burials were highly elaborate and carefully done, like the image of the infant skeleton interred in a first-century amphora from Italy in the second slide shows. Many British babies were accompanied with precious objects, like rare birds, coins, or whole pots. Even more characteristic is the places these infants were buried: under the flooring of agricultural buildings, along boundary lines, in Roman buildings that had been abandoned. (The first slide shows an infant buried in a posthole.)

These small corpses were thus not just members of their communities, but perhaps ones that fulfilled a purpose for the living — cultivating fertility? Marking ownership? Sanctifying space? Robin Fleming calls this the suggestive “Little Magic” that dead infants perhaps were thought to have contributed.

Fascinatingly, these ancient infant burial practices ceased in the 5th and 6th centuries, after which the bodies of the youngest dead become invisible in the archaeological records.