Crimean historians and archaeologists are planning to attract tourists to excavation works on the most popular excavation sites on the peninsula. The Ministry of Culture is procrastinating the final decision, though, expressing concerns about possible law violations and thefts of historical treasures.

According to representatives of tourist industry, the ancient burial places and fortresses, as well as other historical monuments of Crimea, can attract many tourists interested in historical and archaeological tourism.

The idea to use tourists as workforce for archaeological excavations was first presented by professor I.Khrapunov, of the Tauric National University (Simferopol). According to him, tourists would acquire a unique chance to touch real history, and to see/experience things which no tourist has ever seen before.

The proposal looks quite logical and easy to implement: until today, most of the excavation sites have been using the labor of undergraduate students of history departments, who are assigned by universities for professional trainings. During the term of training, each student takes a simple howto course of excavation techniques, and then work under direction of more experienced specialists. It seems that providing the same set of training to tourists and organizing measures to control their work, would be the same task as dealing with students.

But unlike students, the tourists will need to pay for each day that they spend at the excavations. The specifics of commercial relationship which would inevitably develop on the excavation fields as the result of such project, has not been studied though, which causes some degree of concern among the critics of the idea. They believe that the commercial effect of the project must be thoroughly calculated, taking that the excavations must be done thoroughly, and serious research must be undertaken along with plain digging. The other area of concern is the potential of thefts, which will be difficult to prevent in the conditions of active excavations.

As the same time, the center of archaeological tourism has already been launched in Crimea. The center was open under support of the "Heritage of Ages" Foundation and under the sponsorship of the "Eastern Europe" Foundation. Their goal is to inform tourist agents (companies) with archaeological heritage of Crimea and with opportunities to use it with the purpose of development of the tourist industry.

Among the archaeological sites that are listed as potential places for archaeological tourism, there are very famous monuments of ancient history - Sudak fortress, Khersonesos of Tauria, the Cave Town of Chufut-Kale, the Greek-Scythian town Kara-Tobe and others.

There are more than 8 thousand of archaeological monuments in Crimea. More than half of them have not been excavated completely yet. There are numerous Scythian hills (Kurgany), burial places and towns, the settlements of prehistorical people, the ancient Greek cities, and Roman fortresses, as well as the burial places of the Great peoples' relocation epoch, Bysantium forts, medieval cave towns. Crimean excavations have always attracted attention of local population; if they become available for tourists, this can bring good income to the tourist industry of the peninsula and will attract many tourists who are captured by history.