12 May 2025
Presentation "The Funerary Rite of the Krasny Mayak Necropolis"
On May 12, 2025, a meeting of the seminar "Ex Oriente Lux" was held at the Department of Anthropology of the East. At it, Junior Research Fellow of the Center for Archaeological Anthropology Vladimir Lysenko presented his study of the funerary rite at the Krasny Mayak necropolis.
The Krasny Mayak necropolis belongs to the Late Scythian archaeological culture, first identified by P.N. Shultz, a scholar of Neapolis Scythica. Shultz localized this culture within the boundaries of Strabo’s Lesser Scythia in Crimea and the Lower Dnieper region.
At the time of this culture’s initial identification, burial sites had not yet been studied in sufficient detail, meaning that the defining cultural characteristics were primarily based on settlement materials. Krasny Mayak represents a rare case in which the entire necropolis has been fully published.
This provides an opportunity to reconstruct the funerary rite using a representative sample, compare the findings with other known and well-studied burial sites, and identify potential culture-defining features.