For a really different prehistoric experience, consider time travel at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England, devoted to the Viking City that was, in theearly Christian period, York, or Yorvik. Here you seat yourself in an electric cart and move quickly through the scenes typical, first, of 1976, when the archaeological digbegan, then the 1950s, then into the 1930s, back to the 1860s, to 1605 (Guy Fawkes), to 1348 (arrival of the Black Death), to 1066 (the Norman Conquest), and finally to October of 948, when King Erik Bloodaxe arrived in York. Now the main exhibit begins: At this part of the exhibit you see lifelike manikins engaging in everyday tasks in what looks like an ancient village. Through recordings you hear them speak an Anglo-Norsehybrid and even smell the fishy atmosphere (ugh). From rubbish unearthed over years of digging the curators have constructed a lifelike Viking town. Unnecessarily lifelike, for me, was the strip of cloth used as toilet paper and a sample of Viking excrement (pooh).
Entrance into the Jorvik Viking Centre isn’tcheap, but you can opt for staying in the bookshop and purchasing a 36-page book about it for only two and a half British pounds. It does picture the toilet paper and the excrement, however. Although Jorvik isn’t really prehistoric, the Vikings constructed it on a prehistoric site that’s still being excavated. Displays here show manikins of the archaeologists themselves working on the site and examining finds in a fake laboratory. Somebody associated with these discoveries is obsessed with manikins.
In the same city, just beyond the great York Minster and the medieval street called the Shambles, lies another institution called York Museum and Gardens. Entering by a broad well-planted area populated with seabirds, you first enter a busy bookshop, then move into a museum that starts with the dinosaurs and then moves toward the present through the history of York-Roman, then Viking, then Norman, then Medieval. (In this city, it seems, you must move either backward in time or forward; you’re not permitted to stand still). The museum is built on so many levels that viewing even a small part of it requires a lot of step-climbing.
At this York Museum, swarming with kids scribbling on pads of paper (probably finding answers for teacher’s quiz), I noticed that the Vikings amused themselves with musical panpipes made of the hollow wing bones of geese, a pipe that(according to some musician) offered notes from Middle E to high A, or by playing boardgames with stones fashioned from antler horn, or by sliding around on bone skates (they pushed themselves along the ice with a long pole). Sounds a lot less adventurous than raiding the Irish coast.
February 24th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Interesting. Will take note when I visit.
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Hello there You’ve got a nice web log in place there, it’s quite interesting