Le tombe di bambino in contesti indigeni dell’Italia centro-meridionale: gesti d’amore verso i più piccoli

This paper is aimed to highlight the way the infants and children were buried in southern Italy during the Archaic and Classic period. We analyzed the different funerary rites, the types of sepulture, and the grave-goods related to infants, children and adolescents’ burials in indigenous southern Italy as a consequence of their social role. If the kind of burial is almost the same in all the areas we analyzed, its topographic distribution can be quite different, pointing out various settlement models, while the composition of the grave-good can refect not only the deceased high economical and social status, but it can also assume a symbolic meaning, underlining how deeply the adults took care of the children premature death