2400-year-old pig-shaped baby bottle discovered

Italian archaeologists have unearthed a 2,400-year-old terracotta pig-shaped toy, which doubled as a baby feeding bottle.
The unique vessel known as a guttus, featured pointy ears and human-like eyes, and had terracotta rattles in its tummy to apparently encourage the baby to sleep after the meal.
The small terracotta pig is one of several rare objects found last May in Manduria, near Taranto in Puglia, when construction work exposed a Messapian tomb.
Messapian people were a tribal group who migrated from Illyria (a region in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula) around 1000 BC and inhabited the southeast area of Italy.

Measuring 8 by 4 feet, the tomb contained the remains of two individuals - in line with the Messapian custom of burying family members together in the same grave.
Arcangelo Alessio of the Archaeological Superintendency of Puglia, and his team recovered about 30 funerary objects, which have now been cleaned and restored.

They included jars, plates, lamps, ointment vases, three baby feeding vessels and two terracotta statuettes depicting female subjects.
Objects such as a black painted basin and an iron blade of a knife suggest a male burial, while a strong clue for a female burial came from a special Messapian pottery vase called trozzella.

Featuring four little wheels at the tops of its handle, versions of the vase are often found in the graves of Messapian women, 'Discovery News' reported.
"Analysis of the funerary objects and their context suggest that the two burials followed one another in the Hellenistic period, between the end of the fourth and the third-second centuries BC," Alessio said.
The presence of three feeding vessels would point to a third burial, possibly belonging to a newborn girl, as suggested by the two terracotta statuettes found in the tomb.
"We might speculate that the female individual was pregnant at the time of death," said archaeologist Gianfranco Dimitri, who followed the excavation.