Imagine that you didn’t have a bank account or a safe where you could keep your savings or pension secure.

Many hundreds of years ago, this was exactly the dilemma that faced every citizen who had accumulated a nest-egg for the future. But some found a neat solution.

Solid silver was then, as now, a very valuable resource. If you were fortunate enough to have acquired cooking and serving utensils made of solid silver, with a bit of effort you could chop them up or melt them down and bury them out of the way of thieves or robbers, ready to dig up at later date.

However, the best laid plans can go awry. Just as squirrels sometime forget where they have stashed their acorns, some savers probably forgot where they’d buried their hoards. Others may have met some fate that prevented them from returning to cash in their savings plan.

In Swindon we’re incredibly lucky to have evidence of a lot of Roman activity both north and east of the town, and as the town grows, each new housing development literally throws up the opportunity to find out more about the lives of our ancestors.

Before building can begin in an archaeologically significant area like ours, archaeologists examine what may lie under the site – and often come up with some fascinating finds.

Then begins what some say is the most fascinating part of any new find – deducing the human story behind the objects.

This is Hacksilber, the technical term for a chopped silver hoard. It was discovered in 1997, early on in the development of Abbey Meads housing estate.

Sophie Cummings, the curator at Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, says that area is rich in artefacts, as there was a Roman temple complex at Groundwell Ridge.

“The Romans valued silver very much, and this hoard is made up of pieces of silver from at least three different objects,” says Sophie.

“The silver bowl has been purposefully bent into a flattened square shape, possibly to make transportation easier, and there are several escutcheon - those are flat-shaped plates that allow handles to be attached to them - some of which match and some which don’t. The way the bowl has been folded makes it impossible to say if any of the fittings were originally attached to it, but what we can deduce is that the owners would have been very comfortably off. The average person would have only owned purely functional items, rather than silverware.”

You can find out more about Swindon’s story at the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery. It is open from Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm.

*The Hacksilber Hoard was purchased with the help of the V&A Purchase Grant Fund