Child Burials in Vessels at the Middle Bronze Age Necropolis in Ostojićevo (1650–1550 BC)

Abstract

Burying children in vessels is a funerary practice as old as the art of pottery making. It was present in the Levant and European territories from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, with no continuity or clear geographical frameworks, leaving the question as to what lay behind the custom of placing a child’s body in a ceramic vessel. The earliest records of this practice on the territory of Serbia date back to the Middle Bronze Age, and are found at the Ostojićevo necropolis in the North Banat district. Here, a total of 285 individuals were buried, including 142 subadults, of whom 103 were children up to seven years old and buried in ceramics vessels. This practice was consistently carried out over the entire chronological span in which the necropolis was in use (1650-1550 BC).

This raises the question of why some children were buried in ceramic containers while others were not. In order to resolve this, we looked at the individual age of children in 76 preserved skeletons, the grave goods, and the skeletal orientations of both groups of children. We examined whether the age of the children could influence the choice of funeral ritual and be a decisive factor in whether the child is buried in a ceramic vessel or inhumed without it, as well as whether there are possible differences in the orientation of individuals and the number of burial items.