Common burial, also known as mass interment is the burial of several bodies in one collective grave. Human infants, particularly premature ones, are sometimes given a common burial when they die due to loss of pregnancy, stillbirth, or early infant death. One or two small caskets hold all the infants.

Mass grave

Mass grave

A mass grave is a grave containing multiple number of human corpses, which may or may not be identified prior to burial. There is no strict definition of the minimum number of bodies required to constitute a mass grave, although the United Nations defines a mass grave as a burial site which...

s are a more infamous form of common burial, usually used only in cases with larger numbers of bodies, such as genocide

Genocide

Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...

or natural disaster.