Professor Boris Marshak, distinguished curator at the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, has directed excavations at the Medieval Eurasian Settlement of Panjikent for many years.

Circulation works of art, and artistic motifs along the Silk Road between Byzantium and China and the Fur Road between the Arctic zone of North Europa and North-West Asia and the great civilizations tied together by the Silk Road. The role of the newly discovered cultures of the oases and the steppes of Eurasia in transformations of the great civilizations of Asia and Europe. International contacts in the secular and religious spheres as mirrored by the art of the periods of the Great Migrations (3-10 centuries), the Crusades (11-13 centuries)and the Mongol Invasion (13 century).