Burial rites at the Frontovoye-3 cemetery in the Southwest Crimea

This paper reports on characteristics of funerary rites at Frontovoye 3, which is a cemetery located one kilometer north-northwest of the village of Frontovoye in the Nakhimovsky district of Sevastopol which was fully examined by a team of the Crimea salvage expedition of the Institute of Archaeology, Russian Academy of Sciences, in 2018. The area of 13,948 sq. m was excavated; 328 graves dating to the end of the 1st-4th centuries and four graves of the Bronze Age, including 305 niche graves, 12 ground vaulted graves, 7 pit graves, 1 jar burial in an amphora, 1 horse grave and 2 dog graves were investigated. The cemetery is characterized by predominance of niche graves, orientation of the deceased to the southeast, presence of a special type of cremated burials and correlation between the burial chamber and the entrance pit in ground vaulted graves. The rites identified at the site have analogies in a number of sites located in the Southwest and Central Crimea; however, the combination of the types of burial rite and their percentage ratio at Frontovoye is quite distinctive.