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I'm Hello and welcome to the history of Vikings.

Today I'm joined by Sarah Maltby.

She is Director of Attractions for York Archaeological Trust.

She has overseen Yorvik Viking Center in their attractions for many years, and I am delighted to be speaking with her today about Yorvik Viking Center, a wonderful Viking Museum in York, UK, which I will be visiting and doing some recording there this February, actually, at the annual Yorvik Viking Festival. Sarah Maltby, thank you so much for

joining me today. You're welcome. So you are, of course, director of attractions for York

Archaeological Trust and work very closely with Yorvik Viking Center. So for listeners who maybe aren't quite

familiar, could you give us a brief history of Yorvik Viking Center and really how it came to be?

Yeah, of course. So it all began in the 1970s, so quite a while ago now, and it all began,

as I always like to say, as a whole in the ground.

So your Archaeological Trust began digging on the site of Coppergate during the 1970s, the early 1970s.

And the excavation initially was only meant to take a few months, but when they started to go

through the various layers, they

realized quite quickly that the level of preservation here on this site was quite extensive

because it's a waterlog soil, therefore all the environmental remains that existed from,

you know, thousands of years ago was still here. So that turned into a five-year

excavation, which was unprecedented in York time, which put a delay on the development here,

which is now a shopping centre, so it delayed the building of the shopping centre. But for five

years, they excavated the site, and during those five years, about a million people came and saw the excavation

and talked to the archaeologists and a lot of them actually dug here as well. And because of that

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