Kantharoi of Vysochino type – chronology, manufacture and distribution   of a specific type of 1st century AD Bosporan Silverware

The kantharoi with biconical body, with the upper part decorated with friezes of cyma and cyma reversa and the lower part decorated with strigil-shaped pattern, with wish-bone handles ending with balls in their upper part and with leaves as lower attachments are attributed to the type Vysochino after the find of a set of 4 such vessels in the cache of the second half of the 1st century AD Sarmatian burial in a Barrow-mound 28 of the group Vysochino-VII in the Lower Don region. These kantharoi have a rather compact area of distribution, with the concentra tion in the Eastern Crimea, in the South-Eastern part of the Bosporan Kingdom and in the Lower Don area, though their finds originate also from the Mountain Crimea and the Kuban area. I cannot accept the viewpoint of S. Künzl that the goblets of Vysochino type were manu factured in one of the workshops in the provinces Bithynia, Cappadocia or Pontus. Recent f inds of such kantharoi in various sites of the Bosporan Kingdom, including the destruction layer of the fortified site of Artezian in the Bosporan Kingdom with a Greek dotted dona tive inscription on the bottom of one of them allow to settle the terminus ante quem for their manufacture – 46/47 AD suggest the possibility of their production in the workshop of the Bosporan Kingdom. We have at our disposal a unique series of silver vessels of known ori gin, including those from well-dated assemblages, which suggests that such standard vessels were made on the eve or during the Roman-Bosporan War of 45–49 AD, which later ended up either in a fortress destroyed during the war, or in military burials on the periphery of the Bosporus and in the Sarmatian elite burials of the Lower Don and the Kuban region. Most of them came out of use not later than in the third quarter of the 1st century AD. It is noteworthy that the kantharoi discussed show more compact area of distribution than the related group of silver karchesia with a similar decoration of the body and execution of the handles, the finds of which originate from Western Ukraine, in Olbia, South-Western Crimea and the Kuban basin.