Jorvik Viking Centre
The Jorvik Viking Centre in York is one of the most visited and most celebrated heritage attractions in Britain, a museum built over the site of the Coppergate Viking excavations of 1976 to 1981 that uncovered the most complete and most remarkably preserved Viking settlement in the world, with organic material including wood, leather, textiles and foodstuffs preserved in the anaerobic conditions of the waterlogged York ground in a quality impossible in most archaeological sites. The museum provides an immersive recreation of the Viking Age city of Jorvik in a format that has become a model for experiential archaeology.
The Coppergate excavations uncovered the complete plan of a Viking street of the tenth century, with the timber-framed buildings of workshops, houses and the domestic rubbish that preserved the organic evidence of daily life in the anaerobic conditions. The quality of preservation was quite extraordinary, including leather shoes, carved wooden objects, woollen textiles and even the contents of cesspits that revealed the diet, parasites and household waste of the Viking community.
The museum uses a ride-through reconstruction of the excavated Viking street, with reconstructed buildings, life-size figures and the smells of a tenth-century city, to create an immersive experience of the Viking settlement that has been continuously updated since the museum opened in 1984. The archaeological finds themselves are displayed in the museum in a collection that represents the finest single assemblage of Viking material culture from any British site.