As part of our project on the Vikings we went to Jorvik and it was awesome.
We went to The Dig and we dug up some real animal bones from the Viking times! I also got to touch real fossilised Viking poop! Yorvik has the biggest fossilised poop ever found from this period in history and I got to see it. Apparently when they opened it up for testing, they discovered it was still squidgy in the middle like a Mars bar! From the Viking poop the archaeologists could tell that he ate mostly bread with a little bit of meat and that he was full of worms. He was full of worms because Vikings didn't wash their hands after using the loo. I thought it was icky and gross!
At The Dig we excavated Viking, Roman, Medieval and Victorian pits. These were all the time periods that were found in Yorvik as it was excavated. I found a Victorian toilet and hearth, Roman mosaics and tiling, a Victorian belt buckle, wooden fencing that the Vikings used as a garden path and a medieval skeleton. The skeleton didn't have his feet anymore because when people decided to expand the city they didn't think about what was underneath them. His feet were chopped off to make a new road and the feet bones were stuffed into a big ditch with lots of others. He also had a crushed skull, not from battle but from a big building slab for a building being stuck on top of him and eventually caving it in. Poor Viking!
After the dig we went to The Yorvik Centre and we got to see lots of people who lived in a street called Coppergate. It reconstructs what was found at the Coppergate dig site. It was called Coppergate because it was full of woodworkers who made cups and bowls. Viking Coppergate was brilliant. We got to see what the street was actually like, we got to hear the sounds of the street and the many languages that were spoken there (Old English, Gaelic, Old Norse and Arabic) . And we got to smell Viking England and it was smelly!
Then we had a talk with some archaeologists and we learnt more about the Viking people. They travelled to France and became the Normans and they went to Turkey, Baghdad, France, and Canada! I was very surprised by this last one!
We were shown finds from some of the digs, including the Hungate dig that my Grum and Grandpa did some digging at. There was a Viking Ice skate I got to touch (they only used one and pushed it along with one foot like a skateboard) , and a Viking fidget spinner!
Surprising things I learnt at Yorvik:
They had fidget spinners made from small bones off their plate with gristle attached at either end. Children would create a hole in the middle and poke a leather thong through it. Then they would wind it up and let it spin. It would make a high pitched whizzing noise because of the gristle on the end. The aim of the game was to get the piece of gristle to fling off and hit someone in the face! Thousands of these little drilled bones were found in three toilets on Coppergate. The Viking mums must have thrown them all away!
They found 750,000 oyster shells in Coppergate. Three of these have precise little square holes in the middle of them and absolutely no one knows why!
When the children went ice skating, they would take a big stick with them. They would bang the stick on the ice and if it boomed it was safe, if it made a cracking noise then you went round it. A favourite game for children was to see who could get furthest out on the ice. You used to be able to hearing the sticks booming off the ice for miles around. But there was a catch - whoever made it out furthest often ended up swimming back because the ice had been weakened by all the stick thumping!
