Today, I'm back with the Romans, in what they might have called the Far West, what we think of as Suffolk.

We are around the year 400, and in England centuries of unprecedented peace and prosperity are about to end in chaos. Across Western Europe the Roman Empire is fragmenting into a series of failed states, and in Britain the Roman leadership is conducting a phased withdrawal. At moments like this it is tricky to be rich. There was no longer any organised military or civil force to protect them or their possessions, and as they fled, they left behind them some of the finest treasure ever found. Our object belongs to a fabulous collection of gold and silver buried in a field at Hoxne, Suffolk, around 410, and found nearly 1,600 years later...in 1992.

I'm holding a small statue of the upper half of a Roman matron, wearing very elaborate clothes and long dangly earrings. Her hair is fantastically complicated, it's twisted and plaited in an elaborate "up-do", and she is obviously a seriously 'grande dame' and very, very fashionable. She's about three inches high, so the size of a silver pepper pot - and indeed that is exactly what she is-a silver pepper pot. When I pick it up I can see that on the underside there is a clever mechanism which allows you to determine how much pepper will come out. You turn the handle and you can either close it completely, have it fully open, or in a kind of sprinkling mode.