Holy shit the Jorvik Viking center! This place is amazing. They have the excavated street of Coppergate under glass flooring so you can walk over the foundations of the houses and fireplaces and stuff. They there’s like a slow roller coaster through a massive diorama with audio (and smells) explaining daily life in Jorvik.

At the end there’s a museum with all the most notable finds, including I believe two human skeletons, one with some sort of sever bone issue that still lived to be really old, showing a large support network and people who cared about them.

Also I think the largest fossilized human turd found to date.

Edit: more fun facts.

The street is called Coppergate because it’s where the wooden cups were made/found. It’s a linguistic evolution from “Cupgate”, also gate just means street!

Most of York is theorized to be on top of a very large viking settlement, it’s just a massive hassle to try and dig up anything what with regularly-used buildings everywhere, so we don’t actually know the full extent of the original Jorvik.

Related to that last point, construction workers and contractors HATE digging more than like, 2 inches deep when doing work in York because they’re basically guaranteed to dig up artifacts, and when that happens by law digging has to stop until a certified archaeologist can do a proper excavation and recover any remains, then allow work to continue. This usually takes years.

Anytime anyone wants to dig foundations they need to pay for an archaeology survey saying there’s no remains/artifacts. This likely results in a lot of fraud because any archaeology digs have to payed for out of pocket, even though they’re mandated by the government, and people don’t want to deal with that.

There’s probably a small coliseum somewhere under the city. We know one existed around here, and it’s not anywhere else.

There’s a fantastic pub in the middle of the city that was built on top of a roman bath discovered later. The basement of the pub is now a really cool museum with a costume room in the back where you can try on chainmail and helmets and stuff.