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by Simon I Hill, FRPS
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INTRODUCTION
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Kate Woolverton sorts and catalogues some of the pottery sherds. (Those in the picture represent about two days' excavation)
site disgorges many hundreds of broken pottery sherds.Back at the digho~se the rest of the team are busy. The conservationists are gently removing earth and scale from valuable finds such as ivory knives and jewellery. :he archreological botanists are examining earth samples under the microscope for socio-economic evidence. The illustrators draw site discoveries from life. Other members of the team identify, mark and record bones and pottery. And Alan, the photographer, puts to use cameras and film provided by the partsponsors of the dig, Bronica and Agfa.
In building the Jorvik Viking Centre, archaeologists spent years painstakingly piecing together the evidence from the long-running Coppergate excavation . Houses, fences, paths and drains were all wonderfully preserved in the wet soil of the site, but still there were questions .... Were the- houses one or two storeyed? What were the roofs made of? What shapes were the roofs?
Evidence from the small objects - lost or discarded by their original owners over a thousand years ago - told us much about the trades of the people living in the houses - one was a moneyer, another a metalsmith, yet another a boneworker. As the Jorvik Viking Centre was recreated, every step was rechecked against the evidence to make it as true to life - as authentic - as possible. Even the sounds and smells of the city were brought to life. But one thing still eluded us - the people themselves. What did they look like? In the end, the figures in the Centre had to be based on modem people, but the search for reality went on! In 1991, nearly five years after the Viking Centre opened, new computer and video technology at last enabled us to come face-to-face with the real inhabitants of Jorvik.
1 UNEARTHING THE EVIDENCE Of course, the archaeologist can only meet the inhabitants of Viking-age York in the city's cemeteries. But this poses a problem. The inhabitants of Vikingage Jorvik were buried in churchyards which continued to be used for burials well into the 19th century and so cannot be excavated. However, there were a
