Hand-Made Ceramics from the Elizavetovka Cemetery of the 5th–3rd Centuries BC in the Lower Don Region

This paper analyzes a hand-made ceramic assemblage from the large Elizavetovka cemetery in the Don river estuary that has been left behind by the population of the eponymous fortified settlement. It presents the author's own classification of this group of material culture objects based on intact forms of vessels. Six groups of hand-made vessels were singled out based on their functionality. The morphology of the vessels was selected as a typological feature. The author identified the closest analogies for the types of these ceramics. He also recorded changes in the prevailing types of the vessels used as funerary offerings early in the 4th century BC as well as reduced downward the number of the graves containing hand-made ceramics dating to the end of the 4th - early 3rd centuries BC.