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How much can you tell about a person from the things they surround themselves with? Or maybe I could put that better by asking: what is a person trying to tell others by surrounding themselves with certain things?

The answer is, probably quite a lot - it doesn't take a psychologist to spot that revving about in a flash car just might be the human equivalent of a peacock fanning its dazzling feathers.

This week on A History of the World we have five objects - from a chess set to an astrolabe  - that by their beauty, design and technological advancement were guaranteed to reveal their owners to be of the very highest status.

But more than that, as JD Hill explains, they clearly tell the story of just how connected the world was in AD 1100-1500.

On the one hand the Lewis Chessmen look very homely, very familiar - they're an absolute reflection of Medieval European society with its kings, queens, knights and faceless pawns - but on the other they also tell us a great deal about the connections that brought chess to medieval Europe in the first place.

Then there's the astrolabe that gives us a glimpse into Spain in the Middle Ages - it was made in a place where the three religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity co-existed. 

So, let's start with the Lewis Chessmen. They were found on the northernmost fringes of Europe, but they were made to play a game invented in India and brought to what is now Scotland along well-trodden trade routes. They're a luxury item and one that shows their owner to be a man or woman of the world, but they're also undeniably the product of a joined-up age.

In a similar way the 'stand-up and look at me' blue-and-white porcelain of the David Vases not only proclaims its owner's obvious wealth (this is expensive pottery), but also represents a new product that would be exported across the globe.

At the same time sophisticated bronze-working techniques, brilliant craftsmanship and imported brass were combined to produce lifelike and stunning sculpture, such as the Ife Head, for the rulers of one of the first city-states of West Africa. And in the Americas, the status of a Taino ruler - in what is now the Caribbean - was inextricably linked to objects like our ritual throne.

And of course - as anyone tapping away on their smart-phone these days will tell you - little says forward-thinking, sophisticated and well-financed like technology in your hand.

Step forward our astrolabe: an instrument that could help tell the time, locate stars and calculate longitude and latitude. And is, as JD points out above, also a product of a land in which the meeting of cultures resulted in major advances in the arts, astronomy, maths and science.

So, what are we learning this week? Perhaps it's that then, as now, status can be established, and indeed shown-off, by the objects we own. Or maybe there's a deeper point to make about the overall story we're hearing in this series.

From our twenty-first century vantage point it's easy to see just how connected the world has become: modern 'astrolabes' connect us to each with almost unbelievable ease. But as our story of the world carries us through the ages, the connections made in the past by ancient travellers and traders seem to pave the way for our now global networks. The longer the series goes on, the smaller the world starts to feel.

Looking across the objects in A History of the World you can see that various, almost universal, themes emerge. Some because they are part of the story Neil MacGregor aims to tell on Radio 4, others simply because us humans have needs and tendencies that haven't changed all that much in two million years.

A couple of weeks ago, the radio series focused on one of these universal themes: belief and faith. Neil talked about a group of objects that tell the early histories of some of the world's great faiths, from the birth of Hinduism, to the spread of Christianity, growth of Buddhism and emergence of Islam.

When I wrote about these programmes I was struck by the number of religious, or faith-based objects that have been uploaded to the A History of the World website, and the amazing stories behind some of them.

Take this Bible given in thanks to the captain of a ship that carried orphaned and destitute children from Liverpool to a new life across the Atlantic. Or a tile from the Alhambra in Granada, where belief, art and power came together in the royal palace of Spain's then Islamic rulers. Some of these stories are being told on Radio 4's Sunday programme each week, such as poet Andrew Motion's small Hindu figure that watches over his every written word.

This is clearly a theme many of us can relate to and understand, often in very different ways, and this Thursday there's a chance to explore it further. Here at the British Museum our is made up of - amongst other things - talks, lectures, art workshops, storytelling and music celebrating the beliefs and faiths associated with the objects that feature in the series.

You can hear author discuss what religion really is, and our very own JD Hill, whom readers of this blog will know as lead curator of the series, speak about how you make a history through objects.

But it is, of course, also a chance to grab a moment with the stars of the Radio 4 show: the objects. Personally, I'll be spending some time in the company of the broken pieces of pottery, which you can hear about this Friday. Theirs is a story of trade that reminds us how ideas and beliefs are exchanged in the marketplace as well as products.

I hope many of you also take the chance to get close and make a connection - spiritual or otherwise - with one of these portals into the past.

• You can add your faith objects to the growing collection on the site. Find out about how to upload an object to the site.
• The photo is of a church in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris taken by and it's used .

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In the house I grew up in - like many out there, I'm sure - we had a television from Japan. The most popular place to eat in the small market town where I went to school was the Viceroy - serving up Indian food. When I was 'old enough', my first outings to local pubs occasionally involved a glass of European beer.

It wasn't so unusual in the late twentieth century, even in the wilds of rural Hertfordshire, to grow up surrounded by things from the wider world, but perhaps it is more surprising that the same was true across the globe about 1,000 years ago.

This week on A History of the World we'll hear how between AD 800 and 1300 Asia, Africa and Europe were not as far from each other as mere geography would have us believe.

Lead curator of A History of the World, JD Hill told me why:

We can often underestimate the degree to which trade and the movement of peoples took place in the past, particularly in this period. People were moving - taking goods and ideas with them - regularly, and over very long distances.

We also shouldn't underestimate the scale of the world economy created at this time: from East and South Asia, to the Middle East and East Africa, continents were  linked  together in a complex and growing economy - with northern Europe on the outer edge.

This week we have evidence of this in objects and ideas moved around by pilgrims, merchants - and the odd invader.

For starters, there's the Vikings who travelled, traded and - as they're fearsome reputation has it - raided their way from Greenland to Central Asia. How do we know this? A pot filled with coins, jewellery and other pieces of silver was unearthed in Yorkshire in 2007, its contents from as far afield as Central Europe and the Middle East.

A less glamorous discovery in East Africa shows the extent of movement across the Indian Ocean. Broken pots found on a beach in Tanzania they might be, but a closer look reveals them to be variously glazed in the Middle East, crafted in China, moulded in Africa. From these fragments we can build a picture of a port at the centre of a trade network sharing goods between two continents.

In a Buddha head from Borobudur in Java we can see how religions spread along well-trodden trade routes from India to Indonesia. A glass beaker probably made in Syria and exported to Europe tells the story of how pilgrimage - and even the Crusades - increased trade between Christian Europe and the Islamic World.

Yet, of course, not everybody was at it. Japan deliberately isolated itself from neighbouring countries in order to control trade and outside influence. That didn't stop them making beautiful objects like our bronze mirror though.

So there you go - the world was getting as small back then as it is now. But, for me, one of the most intriguing things about some of these objects is that - unlike the magnificent works of art we heard about last week - they are, to an extent, ordinary: broken pots, coins, a beaker.

The lesson here is that you can learn just as much about the people of the past from their everyday stuff as you can from the rich artefacts passed down through centuries. This is particularly striking in our broken pots - one generation's trash is very much another's treasure.

Much to catch up on from the last few weeks. As you may know A History of the World is not just a radio series, we're trying to get as many people as we can across the country to look at objects in a new way both in local museums and in their own homes. And sometimes we're getting them to do it in the middle of fields.

A History of the World was at both the and the finding people with great objects and getting them to add them to the website.

There are some fantastic old trucks like a Bedford J Type Tipper, a Rowe Hillmaster and even a Scammell Show Engine that has helped power fairgrounds for 60 years. And lots of craft tools including a thatcher's legit, a bark stripping iron, lace bobbins and a leathermaker's ploughgauge.

And, of course, there were plenty of farming tools on display from a huge threshing machine to some manual sheep shears. Though the one that has me both fascinated and slightly scared is this pig scudder. I feel it is only a matter of time until it turns up in a West Country horror movie.

You can see all the objects from Devon and the things we found in Cornwall due to the help we had from a team of volunteers from . So I'll leave it to Nina Davey, who marshalled the troops, to explain how they uncovered the most unlikely and undoubtedly the oldest object of the day:

We were approached in the coffee queue by a chap who heard us talking about A History of the World. He asked us if we were interested in a coin he had in his pocket. It was a 2,000-year-old Roman coin depicting Caligula. He regards it as lucky as the day he found it his son survived a bomb explosion in Iraq.

I've just checked the change in my pockets and, sadly, there are no Roman emperors to be found. Mind you, they don't accept Caligula in the canteen anyway.

The days are long, the World Cup is on, Wimbledon is waiting in the wings and the British summer is about to break into full bloom. What better time to talk about snow, ice and frostbite?

But it was on this day in 1910 that Robert Falcon Scott set off on his ill-fated expedition to Antarctica. That means it's the 100th anniversary of his attempt to be the first man to reach the South Pole. (Well, he was never going to become an accountant with that middle name.)

He left Cardiff on 15 June aboard the SS Terra Nova, and The National Museum Cardiff has put the figurehead from the ship on our website.

It's just one of the objects in their new exhibition which looks at how the people and industries of Wales supported Captain Scott's adventure.

It also reminded me that we've had a number of Scott related objects appear on the site. There are a set of Scott's skis from Plymouth Museum and the sleeping bag used by Captain Oates, from the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Both objects bring home to you the huge changes in technology between then and now. The skis are wood and must be much heavier than the modern equivalent, but it's the sleeping bag that's the real eye-opener. A quick look at modern sleeping bags suggests you can expect to snuggle down in one with 'a ripstop nylon top shell... nylon taffeta lining and trapezoidal baffle construction'. Scott and Oates were lying down in a bag made of Reindeer skin, which must be four times as heavy and half as warm. I can't imagine carrying through a field at a festival, let alone to the South Pole and back.

I'm also intrigued by Alfred Watkins' Bee Meter, which I initially thought was to help apiarists count their bees, but is actually a very early light meter that allowed the expedition photographer H. G. Ponting take .

Yesterday there was a of Scott's famous expedition, and today a tall ship is marking the event by recreating the start of the Terra Nova's voyage.

I'm sure there will be more Scott related events later in the year too, though probably none as enjoyable as the that was held in Cardiff over the weekend. It was a recreation of the one Scott and his team were given a few days before they set off - an Edwardian feast comprising 11 courses. I wonder if they served tinned beef?

•  The photo of a camp at the South Pole is by and is used .

For many of us on the outside, it's intriguing to imagine what goes on behind the closed doors of the rich and powerful. And in the modern age we certainly get opportunities to take a glimpse - be it through glossy magazines, or the occasional tabloid exposé.

For us, objects allow us a similar opportunity to spy through the palatial keyholes of the past.

This week in A History of the World, we've got five objects from AD 700-900 that offer the kind of stories of upper crust homes, lives and relationships that would have a newspaper editor reaching for their chequebook.

JD Hill, lead curator of the series, explains:

Our objects this week come from Tang China, the Islamic Empire of the Middle East, a new power emerging in Europe in the form of the Carolingians and Buddhist Sri Lanka  - some of the driving forces of the world at this time. But we're going to hear about the view from the top: the rulers.

Now, that view might not necessarily represent what is really happening in these places, but it's interesting that we find common issues in very different courts across the world, especially in the key relationships between rulers and their wives. But perhaps most importantly by looking at objects from the hearts of these courts, we get a sense of how rulers viewed themselves and the world they were making around them.

So, who are these powers, and which courts will we be peering into?

In the Americas at this time Mayan city states were found across parts of modern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras. A stone sculpture from a Royal palace gives a sense not only of the ritual that governed this great civilisation, but also the role played at its highest level by women - the king watches as his queen pierces her tongue to induce a hallucinatory trance.

In Europe, a large swathe of the continent was briefly united under Charlemagne. After his death it was divided into three kingdoms. A crystal made for the ruler of one of them, his great-grandson Lothair, tells the Biblical story of Susanna, falsely accused of adultery by two men.

For Lothair, there's an interesting undertone to this story - he had himself tried to divorce his wife, falsely accusing her of adultery, when the pair of them failed to produce an heir. In the story of Susanna, the fate for those falsely accusing her was to be stoned to death.

The magnificent city of Samarra, in what is now Iraq, was for a short time the capital of the Islamic Empire. Fragments of a painting that once decorated a royal harem in the city offer a tantalising glimpse behind the palace walls. And a gilded statue of a Buddhist deity, probably commissioned by the rulers of Sri Lanka, shows the wealth of one of South Asia's leading powers of the day.

And finally, from Tang Dynasty China, tomb figures recovered from the burial of an important general show how he aimed to manage his own image in the afterlife. Among the figures accompanying him are civil servants who, as they would have done in this world, are on hand to help manage things in the next.  

So, in our exposé of the rich and powerful we have royal tongue-piercing, a harem, the scandal of royal divorce, and the importance of having a spin doctor by your side - sounds like a whole week's worth of tabloid front pages.

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We are asking curators from museums around the country to take a look around the site and pick out a few objects that appeal to them or remind them of other objects and stories.

Bryan Sitch is the Curator of Archaeology and Head of Human Cultures at . He's wandered around the site and been reminded of how objects come to light and collections are often built from a combination of expertise and serendipity:

One of the wonderful things about A History of the World is the way it brings to light things in private possession that museum curators and archaeologists would not find out about otherwise. Family heirlooms are a case in point. We just don't know what's out there.

A Medieval ewer found near Hadrian's Wall had occupied pride of place on the Smith family's hearth  for over a hundred years before it came to the Manchester Museum to be identified. It was such a thrill to see it. And the family had cherished it.

A Viking gold arm ring remained unreported until the death of the finder, a York builder. It was among his personal possessions and was later acquired by the Yorkshire Museum as Treasure. We can only suppose that the piece was found somewhere in or near York.

It's very important to record details of where things have been found. If we know where things come from they are far more meaningful for research purposes. The pins from London mounted on a card complete with details of where they come from are wonderful. They reminded me of some of my first cataloguing jobs in museums where very often the only information I had to go on was what was written on the card to which the objects were still attached.

But it seems that where there are always enterprising individuals who spot a gap in the market.

Acquiring objects from workmen on sites for a modest sum of money was a time-honoured way of collecting. It could prove counter-productive, however. Some workmen forged antiquities for sale to gullible collectors. Two labourers called became notorious for their shameless 'discoveries'.

The Medieval objects they 'found' during the excavation of London Docks had dates on them in modern Arabic numerals! Initially some museum curators were taken in. Nowadays they are known as Billies and Charlies. The Manchester Museum has one of Jonah and the Whale and it's great fun!

I'd never heard of Billy and Charley and the - it's a great story of two Victorian hustlers. But perhaps more upsetting than discovering something isn't what it seems, is finding something that is and then having it taken away from you.

I am delighted that the beautiful Rudston charioteer mosaic in Hull Museums is on the website. Seeing it reminded me of the one that got away. The Roman had been lifted ready to go to the museum in 1948, only to disappear overnight. What happened to it is one of the great unsolved mysteries of East Yorkshire archaeology. I can only hope it will one day be recovered.

At least one antiquity has made it back from oblivion. An Iron Age sword and scabbard stolen from Peterborough Museum was recovered in Germany and returned in 2007. We often think about the repatriation of cultural property as the debate over high profile cases like the Elgin Marbles or the Bust of Nefertiti but it obviously works at regional and local levels too.

So there you go, things lost and things found. There seems to be a bit of every type of thing on A History of the World.

So, let's begin with a local tale... Way up in northern Europe, in a corner of East Anglia a great warrior has died and his compatriots have laid him to rest. As is local custom, he is buried surrounded by his possessions.

It happens his possessions are pretty spectacular - ornately-crafted jewels, silver tableware, weaponry and a seriously amazing helmet. For some this burial is thought of as the beginning of the English nation as we know it - our warrior is an Anglo-Saxon and it's the seventh century AD.

In Week 10 of A History of the World in 100 objects you'll hear all about this helmet, but, as JD Hill explains, you'll also hear about why the tale of its burial is anything but a local story.

The Sutton Hoo helmet is probably the most iconic object from early British history - it's even had its own stamp! But if you spin the globe at the moment it was buried you realise that if Sutton Hoo tells us about the origins of England, it actually tells us just as much about the rest of the world.

The Sutton Hoo helmet and other objects found buried in Suffolk show that eastern England was at the time part of a wider North Sea community. This community was in turn on the edge of, but very much within, a network of trade that stretched as far as Korea and Japan.

One of the most important connections in this network was a collection of trade routes known as the 'Silk Road'. Running from China to Europe the Silk Road has, for thousands of years, facilitated the movement of people, goods and ideas. In fact, red garnets found in jewellery buried alongside our warrior may have travelled along this road, all the way from South Asia to Suffolk.

The silk princess painting - an image that tells a mythical story of what we might call industrial espionage - is a fascinating glimpse of this well-trodden path; but it wasn't just goods that travelled on the Silk Road. Buddhism spread along it from India into China and from there into Korea, where our Korean roof tile would probably have sat on a Buddhist temple.

At the same time, the Prophet Mohammad was preaching the new religion of Islam in the Middle East. How many people who have heard of Sutton Hoo, or seen the great helmet, realise its owner was a near contemporary of his?

A small gold coin not only tells the story of this new faith's rapid expansion, but also of how a ruler of the new Islamic empire that stretched from Iran to Spain resolved the relationship between religious and political power.

Meanwhile, there are shades of the buried hero of this tale in the Moche pot from Peru. In the shape of a kneeling soldier and found in a tomb, it shows how similarly warriors were regarded on opposite sides of the world at this time.

This week is halfway through our series and in many ways is - to borrow someone else's phrase - a tipping point, as we leave the ancient world behind.

In the next four weeks we'll discover what many of us would call the Middle Ages; meeting new powers, discovering new inventions and unearthing hidden treasures.

Exciting eh?

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Browsing this website earlier today I came across a Sunday school medal, uploaded by a member of the Hinde Street Methodist Church. It was probably made in the early twentieth century and presented to one of thousands of children to reward good attendance. I like to think of the proud owner wearing the medal to show off not only their commitment to Sunday school, but also to the Methodist arm of Christianity.

That got me thinking about religious symbols in general - crucifixes around necks, colourful portraits of Hindu gods, statues of the Buddha - which are such familiar images that for most of us there's an instant, almost unconscious, recognition of what they represent.

Week 9 of A History of the World in 100 objects tells the story of a period when some of the modern world's great religions not only first developed but as lead curator JD Hill explains, also established the imagery that we know them by now.

This is a week of religion. Roughly in the period between AD 100 and 600 many of the great faiths - which are still the major religions of the world today - are spreading and it's during this time that they developed their visual identity.

For example, although it was at least 600 years after the start of Buddhism, this is the point when the image of the Buddha - one of the most well-known images anywhere in the world - became established.

Our seated Buddha, from Pakistan, is among the earliest depictions of the man himself and illustrates JD's point perfectly - it's so familiar that it could have been carved in our own times.

But it wasn't just Buddhism. At this point Christianity and Hinduism both developed the imagery and symbolism we recognise today, and what's really interesting is that they did it within a few hundred years of each other.

In South Asia, an early view of the gods of modern Hinduism can be glimpsed on the face of our coin of Kumaragupta - minted by a ruler of the Gupta dynasty that presided over India's so-called 'golden age'. In Europe, the Hinton St Mary mosaic, that once formed the floor of a villa in Roman Britain, offers quite possibly the earliest image of Jesus Christ. Here it tells the story of the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire, and why - at this point in time - images of Christ start to be made.

And just as Christianity became the state religion of Rome, Zoroastrianism became the state religion of the Sasanian Empire of Iran - on our silver plate, a Sasanian king triumphs over evil in the form of a wild deer.

Zoroastrianism may not be as widely followed today as Buddhism, Christianity or Hinduism, but it's still with us, unlike the ancient religions of Arabia. A strangely lifelike bronze hand offers a tantalising window on the religions of this region before Islam - a world we know little about.

Islam would go on to establish itself across central Asia, north Africa and southern Europe. We'll find out all about the impact of this rapid rise next week.