Most archaeological research within the Vale of York has been concentrated in a small area of about five square miles; the city of York itself. Almost continuously, from the construction of the fortress of the Roman IX legion in AD 71 until the 18th century, the York was one of the most important military, political and ecclesiastical centres in Britain. The Roman legionary fortress and the adjacent civil town Eburacum which grew up around it, although apparently much diminished and possibly even extinguished in the course of the 5th and 6th centuries AD, were nevertheless succeeded from the 7th century by an important Anglo-Saxon royal and ecclesiastical centre, which from at least the early 8th century was accompanied by a port of trade known to history as Eoforwic. The settlement of Viking armies in what is now Yorkshire in the later 9th century saw the growth in the course of the 10th of the city of Jorvik, whose streets and tenements were to form the basis of the Norman and medieval city. The Norman Conquest consolidated the importance of York as a royal, ecclesiastical and military power-base in the north of England, and laid the foundations for its later medieval wealth and grandeur as the second city of medieval England.
This historical pedigree has prompted an impressive amount of archaeological research within the city, particularly in the course of the past 40 years. Major excavations have been carried out in the Roman fortress and civilian town, on the Anglo-Saxon port-of-trade near the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Foss, within York Minster and in a number of the city’s medieval churches, priories and hospitals. These have been complemented by a host of smaller investigations. Most famously, excavations in Coppergate between 1976 and 1982 revealed the development of part of one of the city’s streets from the late 9th century through to the 15th, and in doing so demonstrated the spectacular survival of artefacts and structures in organic materials (such as wood) in the waterlogged soils beneath the modern city streets, in some parts extending to depths of 7 metres and more beneath the modern ground level.
The archaeological heritage of the city of York, then, is a rich one, and has been enthusiastically explored (although it is in the nature of archaeological research that it throws up as many new questions as it answers old ones). But in terms of the Vale of York, the city itself is but one, if admittedly important part, of a wider landscape which has almost certainly been inhabited for four or five times as long as the city founded by the Romans, but of whose pre-medieval history and development we currently know very little. There are exceptions to this; long-term archaeological fieldwork in and around the Foulness valley has begun to identify patterns of late Iron Age and Roman land-use in the south-eastern part of the Vale, and a limited amount of palaeoenvironmental data (such as pollen and plant remains which allow ancient vegetation and land-use to be identified) has been recovered from the river valleys south of York. But by-and-large knowledge of early settlement and human occupation of the Vale, which has been described as a ‘thousand square mile oasis’, is slight.
Until quite recently it was widely assumed that most of the Vale would have been an empty wasteland until about the 12th century AD, when documentary sources begin to refer to villages and farms. But over the last twenty years aerial photography and archaeology have started to reveal a much longer and more exciting story. Parts of the Vale were certainly settled by humans in the late Iron Age, immediately before the Roman conquest of Britain in the 1st century AD. It is possible that in the Roman period (which lasted until the early 5th century AD) areas of the Vale were transformed from seasonally occupied lowland grazing pastures into intensively farmed landscapes. Going still further back in time, a small number of finds and sites suggest that the Vale, probably then a wet and marshy area, was exploited for its fuel, fowl and fish resources by Neolithic communities in the 2nd millennium BC, and by hunter-gathering bands of the Mesolithic in the 3rd millennium BC and earlier. It may even be the case, in the southern parts of the Vale at least, that traces left by their Palaeolithic predecessors still survive amongst the pro-glacial sediments.
The build-up of fine-grained sediment in the non-tidal lowlands through successive phases of alluviation has blanketed the valley floors and produced contemporary relief, which bears little resemblance to the landscape of earlier archaeological periods. Consequently, evidence of human activity in this landscape, including structures, features and artefacts, even from the relatively recent past, is in many areas, likely to be deeply buried beneath alluvium. This is also true for the tidal lowlands where periods of erosion associated with increased storminess, as well as warping will also have affected coastline configuration.
Archaeological visibility is also affected by the nature of the sediments which infilled Lake Humber. Visibility is poor on the silts and clays of the 25 Foot Drift and probably reflects the homogenous nature of the fine grained material. In contrast, archaeological visibility is greater on the fluvial sands of the 25 Foot Drift and the aeolian sands, although reworking of these latter deposits during the Holocene may have resulted in the erosion and/or burial of archaeology.
