Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi was from the generation of those who had a hard life experience of war years. Therefore, when he came to archeology, he already had hard war years behind him, wounds, concussion, harsh post-blockade Leningrad. And when in the summer of 1946, after finishing his first year, he first got into the archeological expedition of A.N. Bernshtam, who was conducting research in the southern regions of Kyrgyzstan, the sunny and fertile Fergana Valley, no less fertile mountain-valley territory surrounding it, could not help but surprise and attract special attention of Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi. After the very first expedition and communication with the amazing A. N. Bernshtam, he decided to connect his life with the archeology of Central Asia. Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi became a permanent participant in the expeditions of A.N. Bernshtam, his assistant, student and later the continuer of his research in the Fergana Valley.

After graduating from the university, in the same year of 1950, he was enrolled in graduate school at the Leningrad branch of the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Институт истории материальной культуры АН СССР), under the supervision of Professor A.N. Bernshtam. In 1954, Yuri Alexandrovich successfully defended his candidate’s dissertation on the topic of “Ancient Fergana“, where all the material collected at that time on the culture of the ancient population of the valley was summarized. In the same year, he was enrolled in the staff of the Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences as a research fellow.

Since at that time A.N. Bernshtam, who published one of his most significant works, “An Essay on the History of the Huns” in 1951, fell under the millstones of the last Stalinist repressions and was accused of “apologizing for wars of conquest” due to the exaggeration of the role of the Huns in history, of “pan-Turkism,” and the exaltation of the role of nomadic peoples in world history and culture. He was removed from all work, teaching, and supervising graduate students. At that time, the Kyrgyz branch of the Academy of Sciences, together with the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, created a Complex Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition, the main goal of which was to collect materials for the study of the ethnogenesis of the Kyrgyz people and their culture. It was a truly complex expedition that included not only historical and ethnographic work, but also archaeological and anthropological work, in order to clarify many issues of the history and culture of the population that lived in ancient times and the Middle Ages on the territory of modern Kyrgyzstan. The expedition included scientists not only from Kyrgyzstan, but also from Moscow, Leningrad and other scientific centers. Therefore, instead of A.N. Bernshtam, his student Yu.A. Zadneprovskyi was appointed head of the South-Kyrgyz detachment as part of this expedition.

In fact, from that time on, Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi continued his teacher’s research in the Fergana Valley, and especially in the southern regions of Kyrgyzstan, and devoted his entire life to it. And, of course, working with A. N. Bernshtam, he adopted his methodology of territorial and chronological scope of expeditionary research. In the first years of independent expeditionary work as part of a complex archaeological and ethnographic expedition, and then as part of the Kyrgyz archaeological expedition, he surveyed a wide territory, including the valleys of the rivers of the Karasuy and Uzgen oases: Yassy, ​​Kara-Darya, Kurshab, Kara-Kulja and Tar-Alayka, etc., identifying and recording monuments of all types, of which more than 70 monuments were identified, dating back to antiquity and the Middle Ages.

In the 1950s, along with the monuments of the settled agricultural population of the Osh oasis, Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi carried out excavations of burial mound monuments of the nomadic population, first under the direction of A. N. Bernshtam, then independently. Thus, in the high-mountain Alai Valley, he continued the research of the Chak and Kara-Shvak burial grounds, begun with A. N. Bernshtam, as well as a number of other burial grounds with ground burials of the Saks, with undercuts and catacombs of the subsequent period. (Zadneprovskyi 1960, pp. 68-84).

In the second half of the 1950s, Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi carried out reconnaissance routes in the southwestern part of Kyrgyzstan, now the Batken and Leilek districts of the Batken region. Here, in addition to reconnaissance, he excavated the burial mounds of Kara-Tukai, Kara-Moinok, Kairagach and others, with undercut and catacomb burials. Judging by the design of the burial structures and the forms of ceramics, these burials are similar to the Karabulak burials, but Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi does not mention this, although he draws attention to their difference from similar burials in the Uzgen oasis and the Alay Valley. The results of the research of the monuments of the nomadic population of the 1950s were covered in detail in the book “Archaeological monuments of the southern regions of the Osh region” (Frunze, 1960). The value of this book is not only that it describes the studied monuments in detail, but also that it provides illustrative material that significantly supplements the written information. Also, the materials for the archaeological map are invaluable, where all the monuments identified by A.N. Bernshtam and Yu.A. Zadneprovskyi by that time are marked. The lists are given by districts with the necessary information about their location, the number of mounds, the degree of study and preservation. These materials are a valuable source for today’s archaeological work, especially in matters of determining the preservation of monuments.

Soon, in 1962, the second book “The Ancient Agricultural Culture of Fergana” was published (Moscow-Leningrad, 1962. /MIA, No. 119), which reflected the materials of the initial period of research into monuments left by the sedentary population of Fergana, such as Dalverzin of the Late Bronze Age and Shorobashat of the Antiquity era.

In subsequent years, the main attention of Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi was focused on the study of the largest settlement of the Chust culture – Dalverzin, stationary excavations of which continued for 17 field seasons. As well as monuments of the Chust culture of the Osh-Karasu oasis. The problems of the history of the tribes of Fergana in the Late Bronze Age and the definition of the place of Fergana in the system of early agricultural regions of Central Asia are devoted to the doctoral dissertation “Chust culture of Fergana and monuments of the early Iron Age of Central Asia.” 1975.

The value of the works of Yu.A. Zadneprovskyi on the Chust period is that as a result of a detailed survey of the territories, he identified individual oases of the distribution of monuments, counted their number in each oasis, and also classified them by size, the presence of defensive structures, etc. Thus, he identified the Uzgen oasis with 13 settlements, Karasuysky, Karadarya, Khodjaabad, Gava-Kasansaisky and others. Such a complete identification of monuments and their classification is not found in any other administrative division, either on the territory of Kyrgyzstan or in neighboring countries.

Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi also turned to the nomadic archeology of Central Asia with great success. A number of his works on this topic were combined in a small book, “Ancient Nomads of Central Asia” (1996). Like his teacher, A. N. Bernshtam, Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi studied the problems of archeology over a wide chronological range: from the Bronze Age to the Middle Ages. And he did so much that it is impossible to list it all here.

But the crowning achievement of all his works was the research of the Chust settlement on the slope of Mount Suleiman-Too, conducted jointly with his student E.V. Druzhinina. The settlement discovered and studied here was the source and predecessor of the city of Osh. This is a truly rare phenomenon in archaeological science, when on the territory of a modern city there are monuments of almost all periods, starting from the Bronze Age and up to the late Middle Ages, when the modern city was already formed. The peculiar phenomenon of Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi and E.V. Druzhinina is that they recognized traces of such a significant monument on the slope of the mountain, which allowed, without any doubt, to determine the more than 3000-year history of continuous development of the settlement at this place, which during this period developed into the largest center of modernity in Central Asia. With this achievement of selfless work, Yu. A. Zadneprovskyi wrote his name in golden letters in the history of archaeological and historical science in Kyrgyzstan.

Recommended reading:

• Bernshtam A.N. Essay on the History of the Huns – Leningrad, 1951. – 256 p.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. Ancient Fergana // AKD – Leningrad, 1954. – 18 p.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. Archaeological Monuments of the Southern Regions of the Osh Region – Frunze, 1960.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. Ancient Agricultural Culture of Fergana // MIA, No. 118 – Moscow-Leningrad, 1962.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. Chust Culture in the Fergana Valley // Central Asia in the Stone and Bronze Age – Moscow. 1966. P. 193-207.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. Chust culture of Fergana and monuments of the early Iron Age of Central Asia // ADD – Moscow, 1978. 58 p.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. Osh oasis in ancient times // IANKirg.SSR. 1984. No. 2. P.54-59.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. Shurabashat and Kerkydon. // Fergana in ancient times and the Middle Ages. – Samarkand, 1994. P.42-49.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. The main stages of the cultural history of Southern Kyrgyzstan in the light of new data (1976-1984) // Ancient and medieval Kyrgyzstan – Bishkek, 1996. P.15-32.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. To the three-millennium anniversary of the city of Osh. // New studies of archaeologists of Russia and the CIS. – SPb., 1997. P.144-146.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. Osh settlement. On the history of Fergana in the Late Bronze Age – Bishkek, 1997a, 172 p.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. Unique Osh dugouts of the Late Bronze Age // Lavrov. (Central Az-Caucasus readings). 1996-1997: Brief contents of the report. SPb., 1998. P.34-36.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. Ancient nomads of Central Asia – SPb., 1997. P.30-43.
• Zadneprovsky Yu.A. The ancient settlement of Mady: (Some results of historical and archaeological studies). // RA. 1998. No. 1. P.162-174