ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introduction to the present state of knowledge, introducing some new discoveries not yet widely known and identifying some of the major gaps in current understanding. It suggests that the extent of pre-Viking occupation in York increased markedly in the 8th century or 9th century. Furthermore, as Tweddle comments, some of these stylistically ‘Anglian’ objects have been found in contexts of certainly later date, and ‘may testify to a conservative streak in the craftsmen of the Viking Age city’. The data for post-Roman but pre-Viking settlement at York which survive a rigorous pruning of the dubious or ill-authenticated are therefore relatively few. Studies of the international contacts employed by York’s Viking-age merchants and their customers have also been refined over the last decade or so. Elements in the 7th- to 9th-century pre-Viking-age trading network which were identified, for example, in the settlement excavated at 46–54 Fishergate, continued into the Viking Age.
