Infancy and Earliest Childhood in the Roman World by Maureen Carroll;

Author:Maureen Carroll; [Carroll, Maureen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192524348
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2018-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

There appears to have been a resurgence of intra-settlement burials in the late Roman and post-Roman period. Several sites are attested in Italy. At rural Mezzocorona (Trentino), three neonatal graves were found in habitations that were still in use and not yet abandoned at the end of the third century ad.83 The so-called slave barracks at late Roman Villa Magna near Rome were also still inhabited when babies were buried under the floors of individual rooms, two infants in one room (room 13) and four in another (room 23).84 These ranged in age from newborn to between twelve and eighteen months, and there was no sign of careless disposal; instead, they were buried in pits containing rudimentary coffins made of broken tiles.85 But there is evidence to suggest that abandoned villas and farms were searched out in the late Roman and early post-Roman period for use as burial grounds. Perhaps the most well-known of these is Lugnano where the skeletons of forty-seven premature infants, neonates, and post-neonatal children were excavated in five rooms of a Roman villa no longer in use when it was reused for burials in the mid-fifth century ad.86 Twenty-two of the infants were probably aborted foetuses. These infants were buried in simple pits, or in arrangements of reused roof tile, or in an amphora, and there was no sign of greater care having been taken for any of the infants on the basis of age.87 The excavator, David Soren, suggested that these were victims of a malaria epidemic, and the extraction of DNA from the oldest child (two or three years old) confirmed that at least this child had suffered from the disease.88 Further south, on the site of the rural estate abandoned in the second century ad at Settefinestre near Cosa, spoliation activity was taking place between the end of the fourth and the sixth century ad when several adults and children, including a newborn baby, were deposited in the rubble.89

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