Any artifact that cannot be put into a container will not be generated, however.
It's possible, albeit with the same chance as any other item, for the chests to contain artifacts. Each chest contains 2d4 magic items (25% of which will be a random piece of magic armor, the other 75% of which will be any magical item). They contain monsters to guard the treasure inside 4 chests. DNetHack adds a separate type of vault, similar to gold-containing vanilla vaults.