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Bones, teeth, and estimating age of perinates: Carthaginian infant sacrifice revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

J.H. Schwartz ,
F.D. Houghton ,
L. Bondioli  and
R. Macchiarelli
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Extract

Writing about the ‘Tophet’, a children's cemetery in Carthage, Smith et al. argued in these pages that the age distribution of the children peaks at 1–1.49 months, supplying “another link in the chain of evidence—funerary practices, texts, iconography—that supports the interpretation of the Phoenician Tophets as ritual sites set aside for infant sacrifice” (2011: 871). In this they had challenged Jeffrey Schwartz and colleagues, who previously argued (2010) that “skeletal remains from Punic Carthage do not support systematic sacrifice of infants”. Here Schwartz et al. restate their position for Antiquity readers, showing that the verdict on the Phoenician practice of child sacrifice is, at best, not proven.

Keywords

CarthagePunicfirst millennium BCTophetinfanticidechild burialhuman sacrifice
Type
Research article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 86 , Issue 333 , September 2012 , pp. 738 - 745
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2012 

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