Woman and child: The singular testimony of a Punic tomb in the necropolis of Monte Sirai (Carbonia-Sardinia, Italy)

•A peculiar funeral rite was found in the necropolis of Monte Sirai (Italy).•The tomb T310 presents a female individual together with a perinatal individual.•Perinatal remains were deposited in a cooking pot accompanied by avifaunal remains.•XRD/FT-IR analysis showed that the infant remains underwent intense heat treatment.•This burial has close analogies with practices in tophet sanctuaries. In this paper we present a case of a double burial (T.310/326) from the Phoenician Punic necropolis of Monte Sirai (Carbonia, Sardinia, Italy). This peculiar tomb, which comprises the inhumation of a woman, presents unique constructive features, namely a big stone cover that confers a high visual reference to the necropolis. Furthermore, a cooking pot with two handles was laid on the tibias during the final closure of the tomb which included remains from at least three birds of the Turdidae family. Strikingly, these remains were mixed with those from a perinatal infant who could possibly constitute the progeny of the woman buried in the tomb. The combined XRD/FT-IR analysis showed that the infant remains underwent intense heat treatment, while the adult and bird remains remained unburned. This urned infant burial involving perinatal and animal remains has close analogies with practices of infant depositions in the contemporaneous Phoenician and Punic tophet sanctuaries of the central Mediterranean.