INTERESTING: 450 Dead Babies Found in Athenian Well Sheds Light on Ancient Greeks.

In the 1930s, archaeologists started excavating the Athenian agora, the marketplace in the center of the ancient Greek city. Besides coming across the grand temples and statues for which the city is now known, they found something they originally thought mundane: a well, hewn into the bedrock.

They got a shock when they looked inside. There, they found the skeletons of hundreds of dogs and human infants. The disturbing assemblage of ancient dead mystified the archaeologists. Over the years, scholars put forward two main hypotheses to explain the bizarre find, which is unlike anything uncovered in the ancient world, unique in terms of both the number of dead babies and the inclusion of canine carcasses. Some ventured that the trove could be the mortifying result of a mass infanticide; others guessed a plague was to blame.

Over the last two decades, a team of researchers have wielded the latest technologies available to analyze the remains. They have concluded that neither of these hypotheses are likely correct. Their analysis, soon be submitted to Hesperia, an academic journal published by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, casts a new and macabre light on ancient Athenian society.

Maria Liston, a biological anthropologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and her team determined that there were 450 dead infants in the well, along with 150 dogs and puppies, and the skeleton of one adult with some serious physical deformity. Mixed in with the bones, they found tons of pottery shards. By dating this material, Washington University in St. Louis archaeologist Susan Rotroff calculated that the bodies ended up there sometime between 165 and 150 B.C., at the end of the Hellenistic period following the conquests of Alexander the Great and shortly before the Romans invaded Greece.

The well babies appear to have died naturally, and not as part of some pandemic. All of the infants, save three, were less than a week old at the time of death, Liston says. Her study of the skulls suggests that as many as one-third died of bacterial meningitis, an infection of the brain and surrounding tissues often caused by cutting the umbilical cord with an unsterile object—still a common cause of death in some parts of the developing world. Meningitis leaves recognizable marks in the skull bones, Liston says. The other Greek babies, she adds, likely died from one of the many other diseases and health conditions common at the time, such as dehydration from diarrhea, that don’t leave any stamp on the skeleton.


The well was surrounded by several abandoned metalworking shops, and in it, archaeologists found a fair amount of bronze scraps. The copper from this alloy, which soaked into the bones when the well was filled with water, has strong antibacterial properties and likely explains why these materials are “remarkably well-preserved,” Liston says.

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