After his PhD on the Origins and Early Development of Metallurgy in Western Europe, Dr Roberts became Curator at the British Museum, responsible for the European Bronze Age collections, recording Bronze Age hoards found by metal-detecting in England and researching and co-writing 41 programmes in the British Museum/BBC Radio 4 series and accompanying book A History of the World in 100 Objects. Dr Roberts is now Associate Professor of Archaeology at Durham University, researching the transmission of new objects and technologies in northwest and southeast Europe from the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age.