A pit in Crimea holds vessels buried upside down for the gods of the underworld

Archaeologists digging at an ancient settlement on Crimea’s Kerch Peninsula have uncovered a sacred precinct where offerings were deliberately lowered into a deep shaft, ceramic vessels were turned upside down for gods of the underworld, and a powerful earthquake appears to have struck while a ritual meal was still cooking, roughly 1,700 years ago. The find preserves an unusually vivid snapshot of religious life at the site, capturing both centuries of accumulated ritual practice and the single violent moment that interrupted it.

A bell-shaped shaft at Artezian

The discoveries emerged from excavations carried out in 2024 and 2025 on the southern temenos, or sacred precinct, of the ancient Bosporan settlement of Artezian. Archaeologist Nikolai Vinokurov of Moscow Pedagogical State University details the findings in the 2026 volume of Drevnosti Bospora, an international archaeological annual published by the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The newly excavated area sits close to the remains of a sanctuary once associated with Zeus Genarchos and Zeus Soter.

Among the most striking features is Pit 837, a bell-shaped shaft roughly 4.12 metres deep. It appears to have originally served another purpose before being converted into a bothros, a pit used specifically for ritual deposits. Archaeologists identified several distinct layers of offerings inside it, indicating the feature was used repeatedly over time rather than filled during a single ceremony.

Vessels turned toward the earth

Whole ceramic vessels had been carefully placed at different depths within the pit, many of them positioned upside down, according to the study reported by Arkeonews. Vinokurov connects that repeated inversion to religious practices directed at chthonic gods, deities associated with the earth and the underworld, a form of ritual treatment that was already established in local religious practice during the first centuries CE.

The offerings extended well beyond pottery. Archaeologists recovered a realistically shaped sandstone phallus measuring 72 millimetres long, eight circular counters cut from amphora walls, an iron knife, jewelry and other small objects. Sediment samples also contained carbonized wheat and barley grains along with remains of cultivated grapes, including several seeds recovered directly from a large red-slipped bowl; the study raises the possibility, cautiously, that some of these plant remains were themselves part of the offerings. A neighboring ritual pit produced an even more unusual object: a piece fashioned from a horse ankle bone, shaped to resemble the stylized torso of an animal, possibly a boar or pig, decorated with a net-like pattern and two rounded eyes painted in bright blue. No comparable painted object had previously turned up at Artezian.

An earthquake mid-meal

Above and around the older ritual pits, archaeologists identified a later phase of activity centered on a small building equipped with two altars and an unusual two-level oven. Vinokurov suggests the structure may have functioned as a sanctuary, with the oven used to prepare food for participants or attendants at sacred dining ceremonies. The oven’s construction was itself unusual: rather than the vertical supports typically found beneath a cooking platform, part of the surface rested on a hollow, tapering clay cone, a feature for which the study reports no known close architectural parallel.

A strong earthquake, dated broadly to between 255 and 269 or 275 CE, then struck the site, damaging the building, its altars and the oven. Part of the cooking structure collapsed directly into the older ritual pit below, carrying vessels down with it. Several of the pots still preserved blackened organic residue on their interior surfaces, likely the remains of burned porridge or another prepared food, leading Vinokurov to conclude that the earthquake hit while a meal was actively being prepared, most likely during daylight hours.

Marks left on the altars

The earthquake’s damage extended to the site’s ritual installations as well. A limestone altar used for libations was split by a seismic crack, while a separate altar built from mudbrick preserved evidence of repeated ceremonial use over time. Its limestone cover had been recoated with clay at least seven times, with each successive layer bearing traces of burning. Rather than assigning fixed symbolic significance to that number, the study suggests the layers more likely represent successive episodes of ritual activity spread across years or generations.

A sacred zone that outlasted its temple

The features uncovered in 2024 and 2025 sit within a much older sacred landscape. Artezian’s southern temenos previously held a Doric temple dedicated to Zeus Genarchos and Soter, with building phases tied to the reigns of Mithridates VI Eupator and his son Pharnakes. That sanctuary went through repeated cycles of destruction and rebuilding, and its later history remains complex and only partly resolved.

What the new excavations demonstrate more clearly is that the area’s sacred status survived major architectural upheaval. Later sacrificial pits at the site contained fragments of a large marble statue of Zeus, including portions of its torso and head, alongside the skeletal heads of horses, goats, pigs and sheep. Terracotta figurines, lamps, coins, magical graffiti and other votive objects were also deposited across the ritual zone. Even after the Temple of Zeus Genarchos and Soter itself was destroyed, altars, bothroi and evidence of fire rituals continued to mark the southern precinct as sacred ground.

Vinokurov frames the 2024-2025 discoveries not as an isolated ritual installation but as another chapter in Artezian’s long religious history. The earthquake preserved one unusually vivid moment within that larger story, freezing vessels mid-fall from an oven while food was still cooking. The deeper narrative, though, lies beneath the ruined building, inside a four-metre-deep pit where generations of worshippers had already been sending offerings down toward the world below.

This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.