Vasily Alekseyevich Gorodtsov (Russian: Василий Алексеевич Городцов; 23 March (O.S. 11 March), 1860, village of Dubrovichi, Ryazan Oblast — 3 February 1945, Moscow) was a leading Russian and Soviet archaeologist of the first half of the 20th century.
In 1903, Gorodtsov identified three stages of the Bronze Age in Southern Russia: the Yamnaya, Catacomb, and Srubnaya cultures. He also assigned names to the Fatyanovo, Volosovo, Gorodets, and other cultures of the forest zone.
The Yamnaya (/ˈjæmnaɪə/ YAM-ny-ə) or Yamna culture (/ˈjæmnə/ YAM-nə), also known as the Pit Grave culture or Ochre Grave culture, is a late Copper Age to early Bronze Age archaeological culture of the region between the Southern Bug, Dniester, and Ural rivers (the Pontic–Caspian steppe), dating to 3300–2600 BC. It was discovered by Vasily Gorodtsov following his archaeological excavations near the Donets River in 1901–1903. Its name derives from its characteristic burial tradition: yámnaya (я́мная) is a Russian adjective that means 'related to pits' (я́ма, yáma), as these people buried their dead in tumuli (kurgans) containing simple pit chambers. Research in recent years has found that Mykhailivka, on the lower Dnieper River, Ukraine, formed the core Yamnaya culture (c. 3600–3400 BC).
The Yamnaya culture is of particular interest to archaeologists and linguists, as the widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis posits that the people who produced the Yamnaya culture spoke a stage of the Proto-Indo-European language. The speakers of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language embarked on the Indo-European migrations that gave rise to the widely dispersed Indo-European languages of today.