Abstract

The capital of the Cimmerian Bosporus — Panticapaeum — is one of the most famous archaeological sites of the Northern Black Sea coast. It occupies a special place in the history of this region, since already at an early stage it became a zone of political and economic activities of the first settlers. The ancient tradition conveyed to us fragmentary information regarding the foundation and early period of its existence, however the presence of fragments of painted archaic pottery allowed V.D. Blavatskiy to suggest that a Panticapaeum emporium had already existed in the second half of the 17th century B.C. on the eastern and northeastern slopes of Mount Mithridates, in the area of the so-called first Arm-chair. In recent decades, field archaeological research provided new data that can fundamentally influence the contemporary view of this stage of the site’s history. One of the key issues of the history of Panticapaeum is the problem of the foundation of the apoikia and its early stage of existence. This work discusses the materials and remnants of buildings, which were studied in 2011–2016 by the Bosporus (Panticapaean) archaeological expedition of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts lead by V.P. Tolstikov. The expedition established the early archaic layer, conditionally named the “fire layer”. The only currently known rectangular room D-3, whose corners are oriented in the cardinal directions, attracts our attention. It was attached to the inner side of the solid basement of the supposed defensive wall, to masonwork № 44. The pottery found on the site allows attributing the emergence of the Greek settlement to the last quarter of the 17th — beginning of the third quarter of the 6th century B.C. Additionally, the pottery of certain types previously unknown in Panticapaeum, i.e. Protocorinthian vases, an early Laconian bowl, and Anatolian ceramics, were excavated, and due to this fact the scope of the research has expanded considerably, breaking new ground in the study of this site.