The lunula pendants from the cemetery of Frontovoe 3 from the Late Roman Period in the South-Western Crimea

Abstract

AbstractThe flat cemetery of Frontovoe 3 was discovered in 2018 by a team of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Nakhimovskii district of modern Sevastopol, in the south-western area of the Crimean Peninsula. The site comprising 328 graves was excavated completely. The cemetery appeared ca. late first century AD and ceased to exist in the late fourth or early fifth century AD. The cemetery showed expressive spatial structure and contained eloquent assemblages with abundant grave goods allowing us to determine its chronological zones. This paper addresses the finds of silver crescent-moon-shaped pendants from graves 13 and 94. Similar ornaments occurred in burial assemblages in the Crimea and the northern Dagestan, Kalmykia, Lower Don area, and also in Sarmatian graves in the Great Hungarian Plain. The lunula pendants in question form a chronological reference point for the Pontic-Danubian antiquities in the Late Roman Period.