The SAHMC Yevpatoria Expedition in the Correspondence of Ia. G. Blagodarnyi and P. N. Shul’ts

90 years have passed from the investigations of the Yevpatoria expedition of the State Academy for the History of Material Culture (SAHMC). Numerous archival documents now serve as witnesses of this scholarly undertaking. Epistolary materials shed light on the reasons and circumstances of the organization, the main sequence of events, the timing and scale of the expedition. The new source data have been analysed in the context of the museum and archaeological environment of the Crimean ASSR in the 1930s. The article attempts to reconstruct the biography of one of the correspondents. Ia. G. Blagodarnyi. The research has added previously unknown details on the period of P. N. Schul’ts’s academic biography, and has clarified why the researcher turned to the studies in the Crimean archaeology. There have been revealed the continuity of the work of the SAHMC Yevpatoria Expedition and the previous and subsequent archaeological researches in the north-western Crimea.