The Baby Well

Print Details:

Museum-quality borderless giclée print produced on archival fine art paper with archival pigment inks.

Each print is individually signed by the artist.

Prints are sold unframed.

This artwork was originally drawn with ink on paper.

Available Sizes

• 4x5 inches
• 8x10 inches

Cropping Information:
To accommodate multiple print sizes, slight cropping may occur along the outer edges of the image. Any adjustments are minimal and will not affect the main subject, composition, or overall integrity of the original artwork.

About This Piece:

Pictured is the Agora Bone Well, or the Baby Well, in Athens. This site is the resting place of around 300-450 infants, as well as over 100 dogs and two older individuals: one of which is an adult man, and the other appears to be an older child. The skeletal remains from this well date to around 300 B.C.E., so there is no sure way to know why, exactly, this burial site was used for so many infants, or in fact why any remains were placed there. At the time, a common practice was to keep infant remains in ceramic pots in the foundation of your house for safekeeping from use in witchcraft. Why then, would so many infant bodies be placed in this underground space? What this site’s existence and contents seem to suggest is that someone was trying to take care of poor or sick babies in antiquity. There are many pieces of evidence pointing to disabilities among the people buried in the Baby Well. The older people both had skeletal abnormalities indicating disabling and likely painful conditions. Several infants also had limb differences, other disabilities, and indications of relatively long-term illnesses. There were also baby bottles found in the well, which were used to feed infants with cleft palettes that had difficulty breastfeeding. These remains taken together strongly suggest the people buried in the well were cared for through to their death. This piece reflects this hopeful view of the Baby Well. Hundreds of babies, two older people and several dogs are laid to rest with care: each infant is swaddled and laid to rest on a bed of love snuggled among the other children that weren’t ready to survive the harsh conditions of the ancient world. 

Inspired by the research of Maria Liston as learned in a course taught by Dr. Molly Jones-Lewis at UMBC.

Works cited:

Liston, Maria A., et al. “THE AGORA BONE WELL.” Hesperia Supplements, vol. 50, 2018, pp. iii–186. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26800133. Accessed 23 May 2025.

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