International audience The discovery of human skeletons of all ages discarded in garbage dumps alongside animal remains illustrates a practice documented in ancient texts. For reasons that are still poorly understood, certain individuals did not receive the habitual funerary rites, but were abandoned in waste dumps as mundane items of detritus. We have examined the archaeological evidence of this practice and shown how it differs from all other known forms of human burial. The analysis presented here illustrates some of the mechanisms that led to the deliberate denial of a grave to certain individuals. In the cases we studied, the phenomenon appears to be linked to certain very specific social contexts, and to concern only the most marginalized members of the population. Situations of war also gave rise to such extremes. We consider that the presence of animal skeletons, food waste and varied other types of detritus alongside human skeletons defines one form of graveless burial. This simple definition makes such cases easy to identify, even though this inhabitual association is not always recorded by archeologists, notably because of the way their work is organized. The identification of human bones by archeozoologists is not always followed by an anthropological study, or by a joint publication. So beyond the cases described here, many others are doubtless gathering dust on the shelves of post-excavation storing place. These new examples will broaden our knowledge of this social phenonomen which, while marginal and little-known, still has much to tell us.