Svetlana PankovaSvetlana Pankova is a senior researcher and curator of the Altai-Sayan collections in the Department of the Archaeology of Eastern Europe and Siberia in the State Hermitage Museum. Her main academic interests are sites from southern Siberia and centrl Asia with well-preserved organic materials dating from the 1st millennium BC to the 1st millennium AD.She was the lead Hermitage curator and co-editor of the catalogue for the BP exhibition Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia (2017/18). St John Simpson is a senior curator in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. He has excavated extensively in the Middle East but it was his first experience of travelling across central Asia in 1991 which led him to co-direct nine seasons of excavations at ancient Merv, in present-day Turkmenistan (1992-2000), and develop extensive relations there and in Russia. He was the lead British Museum curator and co-editor of the catalogue for the BP exhibition Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia (2017/18). Read More Read Less