Metal Jewellery in the Context of a Sanctuary: Interpretation Potential. A Case Study of Eklizi-Burun (Crimean Mountains)

Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia. 2019. No. 25.2. P. 255–307.

Mordvintseva V., Lysenko A.

Metal jewellery votives discovered at the “barbarian” mountain sanctuary of Eklizi-Burun (Crimea) are dated from the 1st to the 3rd centuries AD. Most of these items belong to the female costume known from funerary contexts of Central Crimea, which differ by their localization (Foothills and the Southern seashore), as well as by the peculiarities of burial rite (“inhumation’ vs. “cremation). A small part of the jewellery is characteristic only for the cemeteries on the Southern shore containing burials with the remains of cremation.

An analysis of the cultural niches, in which the jewellery items deposited in the sanctuary of Eklizi-Burun of Roman times were produced and used, suggests that its adherents came from the societies that lived on the Southern macro-slope of the Main ridge of the Crimean mountains and practiced cremation of the dead. Apparently, these people got in the Greco-Roman narrative tradition and local epigraphic documents of the Roman period as “Tauri”, “Scythian-Tauri”, and “Tauro-Scythians” inhabiting “Taurica”. Presumably, they appeared in the Mountain Crimea in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC (migrating from the areas of LaTénoid archaeological cultures?) and maintained their cultural identity until the beginning of the 5th century AD.

Keywords: культурная идентичность, Боспор, Bosporus, cultural identity, Херсонес Таврический, Chersonesus Taurica, Taurica, Таврика, Горный Крым, sanctuary, jewellery votives, Roman period, Crimean Mountains, святилище, украшения-вотивы, римский период