Hand-made ceramics from the Frontovoye 3 cemetery of the roman period: production technology

In 2018 the Sevastopol team of the Crimean expedition of archaeological land testing in advance of construction development (IA RAS) excavated a new cemetery in the southwestern Crimea which was dated to the first centuries AD. The site is known as Frontovoye 3. The paper explores the technology of hand-made ceramics retrieved from this site. It examines the data on adaptive skills of the potters who produced hand-made vessels discovered at Frontovoye 3 such as selection and production of original plastic raw material, composition of clay paste and treatment of the external surface of the vessels. Differences in the clay composition of the examined vessels were used to single out two cultural elements, one of which appears to be local while the other is non-local. The nonlocal element was distinguished by presence of grog added to the clay. The study shows that people with the tradition of adding grog into the clay buried their dead in ground vaults; in the 4th century this tradition spread all across the southwestern Crimea.