Newborn Infant Burial

A pottery jar used for burial containing the skeleton of an infant. At the site of Teleilat el-Ghassul—located east of the Jordan River, near Jericho—numerous skeletons of newborn infants were discovered buried in pottery jars beneath the floors of houses, dating back to the 5th and 4th millennia BC.

In this practice, the infant or newborn was wrapped in a piece of cloth and placed inside a jar, which occasionally contained funerary offerings. The jar was then sealed or covered with a bowl or the base of another pottery vessel.