91Èȱ¬

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 wereÌý linkedÌý 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.