Occupation of the thesis is the ethnical history of the Crimean peninsula in the Sarmatian period. The ethnical processes occurring among the barbarian population of the North - Western, Central, and South - Western Crimea from the third century B. C. to the fourth century A. D. are reconstructed by reasons of studying one of the most ethnographical categories of archaeological finds, hand-made ceramics, with all published and unpublished (from the Late-Roman burial grounds Drouzhnoye and Neizats) materials. Taking classification, comparative and typological analysis, cultural and chronological systematisation of the crimean hand-made ceramics assemblage, one tends to assume, that it consists of several heterogeneous on its origin groups corresponding with one or another ethnical component. The ethnical history of the Crimea is consecutively reconstructed on this background. Separated preceding hypothesises were re-exemined or clarified, some new thoughts about a staff of crimean population were state d. It is ascertained that the Scythians, the Tavres, the Sarmatians, the Meots, bearers of the Zarubinetsk-Culture, the Frakians, the Bosporians, the Germans, the Alans, and population that appeared as a result of mixing of mentioned above people were living in the Tavrica during different periods. The changes in the ethnical look of the peninsula are traced in the frames of separate chronological periods; the time, the dynamics, the ways of different tribes' penetration, and also the nature of relations between newly arrived population and local one are determined. The results of the investigation would be of great importance for archaeologists, who are studying and making classifications of hand-made ceramics from the monuments in other regions of the Black Sea Littoral; this results could be used in lectures on the history of the ancient Crimea and Southern Ukraine at schools and institutions of higher learning, in preparing popular publications, and in making exhibitions in museums.
