Professor Julian Richards, Director of the ADS, and Professor Dawn Hadley, Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of York, have been nominated for a Current Archaeology Research Project of the Year 2023. The project, ‘Torksey: from tents to towns‘, examined the area surrounding the Lincolnshire village of Torksey, which in the winter of AD 872-3 was the site of the camp of the Viking Great Army. Archaeological evidence from the site suggests that the Viking army spent the winter here processing the “loot” that had been plundered from the previous year, including melting down gold and silver into ingots. To find out more about the project read these articles from Current Archaeology and The Past.
This is an extension of an earlier evaluation of the site at Torksey, which undertook a complete catalogue of the numismatic and metalwork evidence recovered from this area and to undertake an archaeological field-walking, metal-detector survey and geophysical survey. This assessment was undertaken to understand the extent and development of the landscape and the Viking camp and revealed the large scale of the area occupied (some 55 hectares) and the huge amount of artefactual material that was lost or discarded over a single winter. The archive of this project is held by the ADS and the data can be downloaded from here (https://doi.org/10.5284/1018222).
To find out more about this earlier project you can read an article about the site and these investigations published in the Antiquaries Journal:
Hadley, D., & Richards, J. 2016. The Winter Camp of the Viking Great Army, AD 872–3, Torksey, Lincolnshire. The Antiquaries Journal, 96, 23-67. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003581516000718
