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>Today, Sariyiannidis, born 74 years ago in Tashkent, lives
>in poverty in Greece on a paltry pension from the farmers’
>fund, which the Greek state granted him five years ago.
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This sort of thing drives me up a greased wall. If I were King & Emperor, this guy would receive a proper pension.

It's not easy to organize archeology, but what we really need is a multi-national organization (it's hard to write this stuff without lapsing into the liberal alert words like 'international' , 'social' , etc) which can organize what resources are available. One of the big problems is that some of our biggest / most important sites are in poor countries and even the rich countries do not always come up with the goods to investigate or preserve their own archaeological sites.

If I was in charge, there would be something like this: A multi-national archeology 'department' which organized the costs/benefits of the archaeological sites. Starting with the bigger sites, they would place them under multi-jurisdictional control where the 'shareholder-nations' in the 'department' would stump up cash for preservation and investigation and in turn would receive pay-outs from the tourism.

I doubt much of this would break-even, but it would be better able to fund itself, and the shareholder-nations would be more willing to see cash go out the door if they knew that it was producing a high return archaeologically, coupled with some sort of control over the results (preservation assured, tourism controlled and directed to provide benefits to the tourists and benefits to the archeology).

At the moment, the academic output is all public domain so nothing changes there. It's solely a question of getting more money for the spade-work.

>As it appeared, in 2000 BC, tribes from different parts of the
>ancient world, particularly from northern Syria, were forced
>to leave their land because of a major drought that affected
>some parts of the world. They arrived at what was then the
>fertile delta of the Amu Daria River in southeastern
>Turkmenistan and settled there.
>

I have come to the conclusion that climate shift, either regional or global, is what has driven the larger migrations throughout the existence of homo sapiens. There's nothing like running out of food to sharpen the urge to go walk-about.

"I have come to the conclusion that climate shift, either regional or global, is what has driven the larger migrations throughout the existence of homo sapiens. There's nothing like running out of food to sharpen the urge to go walk-about."

This pertains in particular to Central Asia. The steppe was the superhighway for migrations, and each time the weather improved (both the Medieval Warming and the Roman Warming were warmer than we are today) population rose in Central Asia. The next cold would hit, and some would move, and many would starve.