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Often the only news you hear about auctions is when or has just broken the record for the world's most expensive painting.

Today though the news is about a more modest item, relatively speaking: a pair of dentures that have been . Seems a lot for some false teeth - though they are gold. Oh, and they were worn by Winston Churchill.

They'd be a great item for A History of the World as they were made at the beginning of the second world war, so must be the teeth he was wearing when he made his famous speeches.

They could join the slightly more humble set of false teeth that we have on the site courtesy of Walsall Museum or some of the animal teeth that have been carved and scratched into works of art like this whale's tooth from the HMS Beagle.

Those are some though. Are the gaps and loops meant to grip onto his few remaining teeth? Makes me wonder if we should get a toothbrush on the site as an object that has improved our lives.

•  The photo of a toothbrush is by and is used .

Welcome to another Curator's Pick, where we are ask a curator 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.

Michael McGinnes, although a geologist by training, has been a curator for over 30 years and is the Collections Manager at the .

Michael sees his job as helping each visitor find a unique connection between themselves and an object.

Every visitor to the museum has an opinion on what they like and it's our job as curators to guide visitors to enjoy objects that they would otherwise not consider.  Every object has a story and regardless of what culture or age it may be.

I remember in the 1980s an old lady came to see an exhibition of our paintings and sat in front of one of them crying.  It was not the quality of the work or the importance of the artist.  She had sat beside the artist 80 years before, as a young girl, while he painted the work. It reminded her of her happy childhood.  The old lady had a terminal illness and a matter of days to live. As she said, "This will be my last memory and I can die happy." 

That was a lesson I have never forgotten. It's the story and the connections that count.

The first two objects that Michael has chosen from the site are simple, quite everyday objects - a sewing machine and a mug - but illustrate that idea of personal connections.

When I was young the sewing machine was the centre of the house. It made the curtains and my mother's and sisters dresses. It repaired the bed sheets. It made sure everything lasted 10 years. It was my job to do the sewing after my mother had done the clever measuring and cutting out.

Probably it was partly to keep me out of trouble and partly because I was more adept, and had more time, to sort out the mess when the machine stuck (a regular occurrence).  This is one of the strongest memories of my childhood, and my mother, and that is the basis of museums.

This is one of the most common objects in British Museums. We have to 're-direct' potential donations on a weekly basis.  

Unlike many families in this country, I have no direct connection with World War I. None of my family fought in it as they were all miners and my father was too young. I have a general interest, having grown up with war comics and movies.

However this object is not about fighting, about weapons, about tactics. It's a tea cup. It's about everyday life that the soldiers tried to live despite the conditions. Ultimately it's about luck. The luck that says whether you are the one to come home. The luck that carries a burden of guilt because they often left so many friends behind. This little mug gets to the point. It's about life and death.

Michael's final object is still about life and death, but is a little more unusual - a that was intended for use following a nuclear attack. Not the digital microchip and mouse type of computer but something altogether more analogue and more chilling.

This may seem an odd object to choose but we have recently received collections of material from the observer corps: a secret organization that everyone knew existed but had no idea why.

The computer would have told the observers that their friends and families were dying while they were safe in their bunker. A hideous thought.

This little object says so much about the politics and thinking of the period after World War II when there was still a certain naïveté about the use of nuclear weapons and the idea that we could actually survive such an attack. This is why museums and archives are so important. We must not forget the lesson of history.

So that's Michael's choice of items from the site. You can also check out the objects from his museum, the Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum, including a Murdoch Steam Engine and the world's oldest football.

1066. Mention that year to pretty much anyone educated in Britain during the last couple of hundred years and they'll tell you exactly what it means, but here are the headlines:

Edward the Confessor dies; King Harold claims the crown; William of Normandy (a small kingdom in northern France) invades; a battle near Hastings is won by William; and the rest, quite literally, is history.

Throughout July, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ will be revisiting this turning point in the history of Britain in a season about the Normans. But, with the final week of the latest instalment still ringing in my ears, I thought I'd try to give the Normans the 'History of the World' treatment.

I asked Gareth Williams, curator of early medieval coins at the British Museum, to help put the Normans in a wider context:

The Vikings had been granted the county of Rouen in France in AD 911 which later became the Duchy of Normandy, so the Normans were a Scandinavian elite given control of a French county.

Normandy's rulers shared these Scandinavian roots with their contemporaries across the channel. The defeated Harold was Anglo-Danish aristocracy; Edward the Confessor was the son of an Anglo-Saxon king and Norman queen, and before him, two Danish kings - Canute and his son - simultaneously held the thrones of England, Denmark and Norway.

This was the interconnected world of the North Sea. Blood and culture together connecting much of what is now Norway, Denmark, Britain, Germany, France and - in the case of the Normans, southern Italy.

So when William set sail for England he wasn't just land-grabbing, he was coming to take a throne to which he had a claim: through blood and culture, if not exactly in law.

And when he arrived, in many ways, William worked with and built on what was already here, literally in some cases - as Gareth explains:

What we see really quickly is an impact on the landscape with castles appearing across the country and the building of churches in the stone, Romanesque Norman style.

The system of land-ownership also changes so that land essentially belonged to the king and queen in the so-called feudal system. But there is very considerable continuity with what came before, for example, in the coinage.

And you can see what some of those coins looked like on the History of the World website. Try this one or this one.

But - all that said - what's the bigger picture here? If we spin the globe in the eleventh century AD, what do we find? Well, just as the ruling families of the colder parts of Europe were bound together in a kind of North Sea world, we find cultural ties creating connections around the globe.

Muslim kingdoms stretched from Spain to Afghanistan, and Baghdad was the largest city in the world. There were pyramids appearing in what is now the USA, as well as across Central America. The world's first bank notes are circulating in China; while in West Africa, the empire of Ghana rules a large part of what is today Mali and Mauretania

As we've heard many times in the Radio 4 series, there are fascinating connections to be found throughout world history. Indeed however local a famous episode like the Norman conquest might seem, it is so often part of a much bigger story.

Many of us involved in A History of the World often use the phrase 'the power of objects', whether it's the power to physically connect us with the people of the past, or the power to tell stories. But this week we've seen a real demonstration of this power in the shape of this handaxe from Norfolk.

It currently resides in Norwich Castle Museum, but was found on a Norfolk beach 10 years ago by a man walking a dog. What it did back in 2000 was alert archaeologists to the fact that this part of East Anglia might hold some interesting secrets.

So, a team from the British Museum, Natural History Museum, and many other institutions and elsewhere started digging down on the beach near the village of Happisburgh (that's pronounced Haze-boro by the way). They uncovered remains that have literally revolutionised the way we think about the .

It turns out Happisburgh was home to northern Europe's earliest known inhabitants who shared their beach with mammoths, elk and hyaena's among other flora and fauna, some 800,000 years ago.

The handaxe that started it all was described by the British Museum's Nick Ashton in the History of the World programme about our handaxe from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. In that broadcast Neil MacGregor explained how the handaxe was one of the first great tools to be made by us humans. He also described the way its revolutionary usefulness ensured that it spread from Africa into Europe and Asia. Well, we now know that it made it as far north as Norfolk as long as 800,000 years ago.

You can see a video about Happisburgh and its amazing discoveries on the . And there's a great piece in the Guardian written by Mike Pitts, Editor of British Archaeology, describing what would have been like.

Some of the finds can be seen in close-up on the and there's an of a scanned object at the Natural History Museum.

Such finds truly bring not only the very ancient past, but also the subtle, painstaking craft of archaeology to vivid life. The team behind this discovery spent years sieving, scraping, dusting, digging, scanning and analysing the objects they found. And it's their efforts that enable us to make radio programmes and write object labels that state with certainty what we know our ancient ancestors were like and how they lived.

Once again, I'm going to have to sit back in awe at the power of objects - and the dedication of the people who study them.

Belief and faith are almost universal themes throughout human history and a few weeks ago in this series we heard about the early moments of some of the world's great religions.

This week, as lead curator JD Hill explains, we'll hear about five objects that show how, between AD 1200 and 1500, people created images in an attempt to bring them closer to their gods and ancestors.

What we are seeing are the results of a similar desire that occurred in very different cultures around the world - to make images which help them feel closer to their gods. But as well as recognising the similarity in inspiration, it's fascinating to see how a common need can result in the creation of such different objects. As always, the objects reveal so much about the particular cultures and religions that made them.

In Western Europe pilgrims flocked to shrines to see holy relics, including the bodyparts of saints. The Holy Thorn Reliquary is a gloriously ornate object built to house one of the thorns that supposedly formed part of the crown placed on Jesus' head at his crucifixion. In Eastern Europe, the Orthodox Church created images of Christian saints - known as icons - to be the focus of worship.

In Hindu India, worshippers used statues of the likes of Shiva and Parvati - as they do now - to develop an incredibly personal relationship with their individual gods. While on the other side of the world, similar expresions of devotion in Huastec Mexico saw statues of the mother goddess visited to ask for forgiveness.

From Easter Island, Hoa Hakananai'a tells the story of the moment when religion in this remote spot changed. When the Polynesian inhabitants stopped erecting statues of their ancestors, they created a birdman cult in its place. Hoa was probably made to honour ancestors, but the distinctive marks of the new cult are carved on his back.

As Neil often says, spin the globe and you'll see just how in tune we humans are, despite the vast distances separating us. But, as JD points out, not all religions were - or are - the same:

In choosing five objects from around the world we are conscious that some religions deliberately chose not to create representations of the divine. For example, Judaism and Islam clearly felt at this time that the divine was something not appropriate to make images of.

What strikes me as we enter the final week of the latest set of programmes, is that here we are in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, knocking on the door of Tudor Britain and the Italian Renaissance. In my mind that's not so long ago, but during the same period there were cultures - and religions - in different parts of the world that left no written records. All we have now with which to discover and understand them are the objects they made.

I'm reminded of the power of objects, not only to embody the divine but also to unravel the lives, thoughts and beliefs of the past. Can't wait until September and the next set of programmes? Me neither.

What do you think? Add a comment

I forgot to say on Friday that I've written a short piece on the Radio 4 blog about how we've been working with Radio 4's Sunday programme to look at spiritual and faith objects.

We've been featuring their interviews each week on our front page and this week we've got a great video of the Archbishop of Westminster talking about a 15th century pilgrim's badge. I'll embed the video here but you can read my thoughts on it and other Sunday programme objects over here.