Archaeological team "Meotida" goes to the Crimea for excavation

On July 1, the  archaeological team "Meotida" left Nizhni Novgorod to take part in the Eastern Crimean archaeological expedition of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The archaeological team "Meotida" has been organized by the Center for Historical and Cultural Anthropology of the UNN Institute of International Relations and World History for the study of ancient monuments of the Eastern Crimea. This year, a total of 22 persons will participate in the excavation work. The expedition will comprise history students going for their field archaeological practice, volunteer students and graduates of Lobachevsky University. The field season for the group begins on July 3. The expedition will work on several archaeological sites of the Eastern Crimea. The main attention will  be paid to the research of the Polyanka settlement on the coast of the Azov Sea. According to Natalia Kuzina, the head of the "Meotida" team, this settlement is a three-layered monument, both chronologically and stratigraphically. "The earliest cultural strata apparently date back to the 3rd-2nd centuries BC. Above them, some buildings of the next century were erected, and over the layer of the 1st century BC the remains of some structures of the early medieval time (7th-9th centuries AD) were preserved", N. Kuzina notes. The members of the "Meotida"  archaeological team will continue the research that was started in 2014 on the site of the ancient settlement’s upper terraces.