Third Century Ad Burial Vaults From the Cemetery of Opushki

There was some important event taking place in the Crimea in the third century AD or a little bit earlier that was probably reflected by the appearance of burial vaults of a special design that had not been previously known in Crimea. These vaults comprised an entrance pit and a burial chamber with a short (0.4–0.8 m long) underground corridor (dromos) dug in between them; the funerals in the burial chamber were made on the floor in one tier. Until recently, only a few short-dromos burial vaults from the third century AD were known in the Crimea. The situation has substantively changed as a result of the cemetery of Opushki excavations, which uncovered 17 burial vaults from the third century AD; every structure contained burials from the first half of the said century, with some burials probably dating back even earlier. This paper publishes some results of these excavations. It has been discovered that the first short-dromos burial vaults appeared in the Crimea much earlier than they were considered before, i.e., in the end or second half of the second century. Initially, dromos was not an inalienable element of the burial structure. The earliest burial structures under analysis obviously kept the Late Scythian traditions, such as many tiers of burials and moving aside the bones of those who were buried earlier. The combination of the burial vault construction, which was new in Crimea, and the traditional burial rites can hardly be explained otherwise than by physical contacts between the migrants and the autochthons. The origin of the migration of people who brought short-dromos burial vaults to Crimea was searched for in the North Caucasus. Among the stable specific rites documented in the third-century burials, there was charcoal bedding on the floor of the burial structure and beads embroidering the hem of gowns. These rites are typical of not only burials in vaults but also in undercut and simple pit graves. The core of the grave goods in the period in question is formed by a quite specific set of artefacts. Precisely the same goods were unearthed in the undercut and pit graves synchronous to the burial vaults.