An outstanding Ossetian specialist in ethnic semiology and ethnology, Vilen Warziati was born in 1952 in Vladikavkaz, capital of North Ossetia Republic and part of the Russian Federation. In 1975, he graduated with honors in Ethnography from the Historical Faculty of the North-Ossetian State University. He further pursued postgraduate study at the Institute of Ethnography, a department of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow. There he began working on the problem of innovation in the traditional material culture of the Ossetians.