One type of bridle plaques from the Scythian period

The paper explores a type of ornaments of horse equipment which is rather rare for the Scythian period, namely, rhomboid bridle plaques with spherical knobs on the plate. Presently, 28 items of such plaques are known. They all originate from 10 funerary sites located in the area extended from the Lower Danube region in the west to the Southern Urals in the east, from the Middle Don region in the north to the Kuban region in the south. Three variants of the plaques have been singled out based on several morphological differences. The analysis has also determined the chronological time span when the assemblages including the plaques in question were in use. Besides, the analysis has identified changes over time in the development of this type of ornaments, the area of their initial use as well as their distribution areas. It has been established that these bridle ornaments appeared in the Lower Danube region at the end of the 5th - early 4th centuries BC. In the middle of the century similar items appeared in the Dnieper-Don foreststeppe belt. Their spread to the south and the east has been dated not earlier than the middlethird quarter of the 4th century BC.