Use of stone in medieval burial of Zhytomyr’s Polissya

Stone is not a characteristic element of the Old Russian and Slavic burial mounds. However, on the territory of Zhytomyr Polissya there are a number of known burial monuments in which the stones of different sizes were used. On this territory the use of stone is also known in a later time – after the adoption of Christianity and even on the Christian cemeteries of the first half of the twentieth century. The most widespread theory in the research of this issue is the theory of spreading the above mentioned design features of the burials in connection with the resettlement of the Baltic tribe of Yatvingians. The observations on the use of stone in the burials due to the specific geomorphological structure of Zhytomyr Polissya landscape have been proposed by the authors of the article.