Stone cists of Kil-Dere 1 cemetery

In 2020-2021 a separate team of the Institute of Archaeology excavated the entire cemetery of Kil-Dere 1 located in the northern outskirts of Sevastopol. The site was almost entirely looted. The excavations revealed 421 graves; pits with side niches (one or, less frequently, two) prevailed. Besides, simple in-ground pits with cremations in urns and burials in stone cists were discovered. This paper deals with stone cists; in total, 13 funerary constructions of this kind were examined. The cists walls were lined with worked limestone slabs, one or several slabs were used to pave the cists bottoms and to cover them. The lateral walls of these constructions are oriented N-S. The cists were constructed in the central part of the in-ground burial pits. All graves contained inhumations. The studied assemblages date to the end of the 3rd-4th centuries