Ancient Roman Necropolis With Burials of Over 250 Infant, Stillborn Babies Uncovered by Archaeologists in France

Archaeologists were able to find a massive Roman cemetery that contains over 250 burials of stillborn babies and infants.

The necropolis was found in the historic center square of Place du Maréchal Leclerc in France.

Ancient Necropolis With Baby Burials

The historic center square is situated in Auxerre, a city in France. It was found in the middle of excavations of the INRAP (French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research).

The ancient necropolis is believed to date to the 1st to 3rd centuries. It is considered one of the most massive Gallo-Roman necropolises that are dedicated to stillborn babies and infants that have ever been found in France.

The area, which is presently France, used to be part of Gaul, which is a name given by Romans to a Western European region inhabited by Celtics known as Gauls. The area was under Roman control towards the latter part of the B.C. first millennium.

According to the INRAP, the ancient necropolis is greatly preserved. It also provides archaeologists with a very rare opportunity to examine its unique young children population.

Baby Burials

Loïc Gaëtan, the dig manager of INRAP, and Carole Fossurier, an archaeologist, said that the necropolis enables them to examine all burial practices linked to this special group. It allows the observation of how they got buried, as well as other gestures that the deceased family performed.

Most remains had a fetal position upon burial, though there were some that rested over their backs.

Most notably, the necropolis offers a vast body container variety. This appears to show family and individual choices. There are also some tombs that exhibit great complexity in their construction.

Some of the containers that contained the buried remains are made of wood and ceramic. Others were also covered in textiles.

There are cases where the remains were covered simply with amphorae fragments. This is a type of antique pottery container.

Site excavations started in February 2024. This came ahead of landscaping work plans within the square.

Since the start of the excavation, experts have been able to retrieve over 250 burials. This makes the area quite an important necropolis of its kind.

On the site, the identified remains nearly exclusively represent children who were under one year old. In antiquity, individuals of this group had a high mortality rate.

Exact studies on the deceased are still to be conducted. However, the remains apparently cover individuals who were just a couple of months old when they passed away. They also cover stillborn babies and babies who died because of miscarriages.

There has been a lone adult burial found on the site, in the archaeological layers, that is the oldest. However, experts have yet to explain their presence.

One of the site's odd aspects is that the burials were typically superimposed over one another across four or five various levels. This is a feature that was never seen in France before.

Another odd feature is how some burials apparently destroyed others upon installation, which is not normal when it comes to Roman customs.

While this could have resulted from the insufficiency of space, it may also be explained by how some babies were not alive at birth. Hence, they may not have been seen as individuals in their own right.

There were very few grave objects found in the burials. This covered small artifacts that were likely placed along the remains with hopes that they could help protect the babies in the afterlife.

Gaëtan and Fossurier shared that in prehistoric Gaul, necropolises tended to cover areas where toddlers got grouped together on larger settlement peripheries. Presently, only a part of the site can be excavated. However, it appears that this area is part of such a scope and is situated on a larger necropolis' edge.

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