In 1967, I moved to Southampton. Southampton was one of several new Departments of Archaeology set up in the late 1960s, and its first undergraduates lived through a period of concern in the face of increasing destruction of archaeological sites, and of fervour for proper provision for rescue archaeology. By the time they graduated, Rescue was in being, archaeological units were springing up everywhere, the new departments were rescuing sites on their doorsteps – like Hamwic, the Saxon town of Southampton – and there were jobs which the graduates proceeded very successfully to fill.

So far as medieval archaeology was concerned, the problems seemed most critical in the towns. In 1972, Martin Biddle, the ever-fulminating secretary of the Council for British Archaeology's Urban Research Committee, steamrollered through The Erosion of History, still the manifesto for urban archaeology. This and CBA's Nottingham urban archaeology conference in 1971 first propelled me to York to carry out an implications study on the need for rescue archaeology there. The richness of York's archaeology, the awful threats to it which loomed and the consequent opportunities seemed to be more important, overall, than the prospect of endless years of lecturing in the comfortable purlieus of Southampton, so off the family set.

The founding of the York Archaeological Trust

When established in 1972, the York Archaeological Trust had seven permanent staff, 12 excavators, and an annual budget of about £35,000. By 1986, it had grown to a permanent team of 40, 35 excavators and a budget of £690,000. From the start, there had been a conservation laboratory. To this was added an Environmental Archaeology Unit, adopted by the Department of the Environment and transferred to the University of York in the mid-1970s. There are specialist sections dealing with fieldwork, photography, illustration, finds work and editorial work. Some 20 fascicules of The Archaeology of York, the Trust's report series, have been published and a further 60 are in preparation. Since 1983, the Trust has been helped in its work of monitoring development in York by the Area of Archaeological Importance provisions of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979, and it has become an extremely efficient archaeology factory.

Excavations in York have gone on almost continuously since 1972, cumulatively providing insights into almost all aspects of the city's origin, growth, land utilisation, building types, life style, economy, society, population and environment throughout its history. There have been excavations in the interior and on the defences of the Roman legionary fortress and in the water-logged Ouse riverside deposits of the Roman town, where timber buildings survived to a height of over 1 metre (3.3 feet). Individual features of note, such as the legionary sewer system, or one of the wood-lined colonia wells, or general aspects, such as the remarkably hygienic conditions within Roman York, have brought new insights into Roman urban and military life.

Post-Roman York

Environmental archaeology has begun to shed light on the fate of post-Roman York – desertion and reversion to nature in some parts of the fortress – and the recent discovery of Eoforwic, 8th-9th century York, on a new site 1 kilometre (0.6 mile) downstream from Roman York, explains at last the remarkable dearth of Anglian finds in the city centre. The newly discovered site evidently bears the same relationship to its Roman predecessor as do several other 7th-8th century towns – Hamwic to Clausentum, perhaps Fordwick to Canterbury, or even Aldwich to London. Its excavation is in progress as Current Archaeology 100 goes to press.

Though the Eoforwic excavations fill a complete lacuna in York archaeology, there have been other long-running excavations such as those at the college of the Vicars Choral at the Bedern, or in Skeldergate, or Bishophill, or Clementhorpe which have elucidated the history of institutions or neighbourhoods; and three very large medieval cemeteries have been excavated which provide, for the first time ever, an insight into the structure of medieval urban population.

Coppergate

The best known recent York excavation is undoubtedly that at Coppergate, where between 1976 and 1981, a 7 m (23 ft) deep stratification was systematically investigated from the 19th century to the 1st century. Much of the deposit belonged to the 10th-11th century – York's Viking Age. Four long narrow plots at this period (and indeed later) ran back from Coppergate towards the nearby River Foss. At the street front, each plot contained a timber house or shop set gable-end to the street. Behind were workshops and behind them yards, rubbish pits, latrines and wells. There may have been a warehouse near the river.

The ground was water-logged, rubbish was dumped in and around the buildings, and conditions grew up which were conducive to the preservation not only of the buildings themselves, but of both organic and inorganic artefacts, natural materials and the ambient flora and fauna. Individual objects numbered some 15,000, outstanding amongst which – indeed one of the most important finds ever in York – is the Coppergate helm, made in York c. AD 780. Because of the remarkable conditions of preservation at Coppergate, the characteristics of almost every aspect of life in an English Viking Age town have been revealed in the uttermost detail.

Whilst the Coppergate work was going on, the York Archaeological Trust, an educational charity, began a fund-raising campaign to finance the work. This was based on systematic public promotion – not without its critics, especially in the pages of CA – and it led to huge numbers of visitors to the site, who paid for entry, heard from automatic speaking posts what they were looking at, visited an exhibition, bought souvenirs in a shop and left their names and addresses for further information. They were incensed that the site was to be destroyed – as was Ian Skipper, a very successful Lancashire businessman who urged the Trust to contemplate preserving and displaying the remains in situ.

The Jorvik Viking Centre

On Ian's advice, a commercial company, Cultural Resource Management Ltd, was set up, and an extremely effective managing director, Anthony Gaynor, appointed. The commercial activities were put on a business footing, and eventually the Jorvik Viking Centre was built – in the hole excavated by the Trust, and below the new shopping centre.

The JVC, employing quite new techniques of explaining a complicated archaeological story to a mass audience, attracted 889,064 visitors in its first year, and 897,290 in 1985. It leaped straight into the nation's Top 10 paying tourist attractions, and into the Top 10 museums, paying or free,. Though some £2.6 million was borrowed to create it, it seems likely that the JVC will be debt-free within five years of opening – and then a direct financial benefit to the York Archaeological Trust. Not only, therefore, is the centre effectively achieving the Trust's charitable objective ‘to educate the public in archaeology' – but it is showing the way to finance further archaeology.

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