Glossary Tombs and burial
Jar burial
Also called: enchytrismos, urn burial
The burial of an infant or young child inside a pottery jar, often a reused storage or transport jar.
Jar burials appear in Cyprus at the end of the Chalcolithic, when a few children were placed in urns. At Kition in the Early Iron Age, infants were buried in reused Canaanite jars, usually inside the settlement and without grave goods. The Greek term enchytrismos ('putting in a pot') is sometimes used for the practice. Adults were almost never buried this way, so jar burials show that infants often received a separate funerary treatment.
Related terms
- Intramural and extramural
Inside (intramural) or outside (extramural) a settlement or its walls; used above all of where the dead were buried.
- Inhumation
Burial of an unburnt body in the ground or in a tomb, as opposed to cremation, in which the body is burnt.
- Pit grave
A simple grave dug as a hole in the ground, usually for one body; the normal form of burial in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Cyprus.