Glossary Tombs and burial
Contracted burial
Also called: flexed burial, crouched burial
A burial in which the body was laid with the knees drawn up towards the chest, usually lying on its side.
Almost all Neolithic and Chalcolithic burials in Cyprus are contracted. Some bodies were folded so tightly that they must have been bound or wrapped in a bag or mat before burial, as in the deep pit at Parekklisha-Shillourokambos of about 7500 BCE. The position may have saved digging, or imitated sleep or the unborn child; the graves themselves do not tell us which. See Neolithic and Chalcolithic burial.
Full entry: Neolithic and Chalcolithic Burial in Cyprus
Related terms
- 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.
- Inhumation
Burial of an unburnt body in the ground or in a tomb, as opposed to cremation, in which the body is burnt.
- Intramural and extramural
Inside (intramural) or outside (extramural) a settlement or its walls; used above all of where the dead were buried.