Gayratdin Xojaniyazov

Gayratdin Xojaniyazov was born on 11 July 1948 in the Qoraoʻzak (Karauzyak) district of the Karakalpak ASSR. After school he worked on a collective farm. In 1972 he graduated from the history faculty of the Karakalpak State Pedagogical Institute and joined the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of the Karakalpak branch of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan as a laboratory assistant, rising to head of its archaeology department.

In his first years he took part in field work alongside Karakalpak archaeologists such as V. Yagodin and M. Mambetullaev. In the mid-1970s he worked on expeditions of Moscow State University and the Institute of Archaeology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, including at Chersonesos and in the Lower Volga region. In the early 1980s he formed his own field teams and began independent excavations.

His main subject was ancient and medieval Khorezm: the history of its fortifications, towns and fortresses, and its religious and burial sites. His expeditions led to the discovery of several new sites in the Aral Sea region, among them Akchungul (1978), Ketmenchi-baba (2000) and Dali-kala (2003). He took part in the work to establish the age of Khiva (1984–1990) and in the UNESCO “Silk Road” expedition (1989, 1991).

From the mid-1990s he worked with researchers from the University of Sydney in the Karakalpak-Australian archaeological expedition, a collaboration that lasted to the end of his life. In 2017 the expedition found large wall paintings of Zoroastrian deities, a garden and birds in the central corridor of Akchakhan-kala in the Beruni district. In 1996, under the supervision of Professor G. Fedorov-Davydov of Moscow State University, he defended his candidate dissertation “The History of Fortification of Ancient Khorezm”; he wrote more than 130 scholarly articles and several books.

From 1990 to 1994 he was acting chairman of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments of Karakalpakstan, and from 1995 to 2000 he sat on the commission for the Berdakh State Prize. He headed the archaeology department from 2000. In 2015 he was elected a senator of the Oliy Majlis from Karakalpakstan and served until 2020.

He received the Order “Mehnat shuhrati” in 2003 and the title Hero of Uzbekistan in 2008. Gayratdin Xojaniyazov died in Nukus on 19 October 2020, aged 72.