Team unearths the past... and discovers a great global future

They've been there so long, many have begun to wonder whether the new apartments in the heart of York city centre will ever materialise. However, at the entrance to the building site, a large corrugated iron shed hides the reason for the delay.

The walls are stacked with a series of plastic pallets. They're the kind which usually contain loaves of bread, but at Hungate they are temporarily home to the thousands of finds which have been carefully excavated from the 10-acre site nearby.

In one, a skull sits on a pile of bones and pottery shards. In another, there's a dozen or so glass bottles, most of them looking exactly the same as the day they were discarded and tucked away on a shelf there's a pallet containing what looks to the untrained eye little more than compost. These are Toby Kendall's favourites.

"This is fantastic," he says, pointing out the tiny seeds which lie within the dirt. Toby's a field officer at the Hungate site and a man who lives and breathes archaeology. "Look at this, it might look like a bit of matted grass, but it's probably Viking toilet paper.

"During the dig we've found large stone carvings and a medieval fireplace, but from an archaeological point of view they don't mean very much. It's this kind of stuff which gets me really excited, because it has real potential to tell us things we didn't know about the past."

When Toby describes his involvement in the dig as a "once in a lifetime opportunity", he's not exaggerating. Hungate is the biggest single excavation ever to take place in the city. It's three times the size as the Coppergate Dig, which uncovered 40,000

items in three years and which led to the opening of the Jorvik Viking Centre.

At Hungate, archaeologists have been on site since 2006 and when the project comes to an end next year they will have gathered evidence relating to 2,000 years of continuous history in York. Inevitably, it's the Romans and the Vikings most people want to know about, but of equal importance is the remains of medieval roads, the 19th-century flour mill and the Victorian housing. Recently, they invited one man back to stand on the site of his old 1950s back-to-back.

"It's a real privilege to come here each day," says Rob, standing over one of the dozen or so trenches which have been dug on the final excavation plot. "Historically, it has always been a damp environment, which has helped to preserve artefacts throughout the centuries. The different layers of material, which relate to different periods of history are very clear. So much so, people from all over the world have come to look at our stripes."

Rob is justly proud of the work which has gone on at Hungate. It is only just the start and the job of analysing the finds will go on long after the 150m housing development has been completed, but for city archaeologist John Oxley it's exactly the kind of project he hopes will secure York World Heritage status.

The official bid was submitted to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport earlier this month and if successful it will join the likes of Bath and Saltaire in this country and international treasures from the Athens Acropolis to the Great Wall of China.

However, with competition likely to be intense, John decided it wasn't enough to boast about York being home to the biggest gothic cathedral in northern Europe or the fact the Shambles has some buildings dating back to the 14th-century.

"York is architecturally stunning, but walled European cities with an impressive cathedral are not exactly rare," he says. "We need to show that we have something unique and that's why we decided to focus on what lay below ground.

"From an archaeological point of view, York is a goldmine."

John and his team first began working on the bid, focused on what you can't rather than what you can see, some years ago. It's been a long and often painstaking process and there have been times when some have asked why York needs to bother. It already enjoys an international standing, the tourism industry is healthy and its university together with Science City York already have an enviable status. John, however, is an eternal optimist and if York did become a World Heritage site he believes it would bring more than just a nice title and a little free publicity.

"It won't give the access to any more funds or open the door to a bottomless pit of money," he says. "But it will put us in the premier league of tourism destinations. There's a section on Trip Advisor all about world heritage sites and it seems to me that York could and should be on that list."

John and the team at Hungate also hope that by showing the city is a history project in progress, it will also help dispel the myths that archaeologists simply want to preserve the past in aspic.

"We can't excavate every site in York and we don't want to," he says. "There's definitely a perception that archaeologists are there to hinder development and preserve every last animal bone and every piece of flint. The reality couldn't be further from the truth.

"Yes, it's great to have the opportunity to have a dig around, but the point of an excavation like Hungate is to record what's there, remove the items we think may contribute to significant archaeological research and then let the work carry on. It's what we call preserving in situ. A dig is like a library, we might borrow a few books, but we try to put everything back as we found it. Also the developers benefit from what we find. People like to buy into a piece of history and we do seem to have an endless fascination with where we came from."

However, for John archaeology is nothing if it doesn't also make us look forward.

"A few weeks ago, there was a television programme about the discovery of what is thought to be a Roman gladiator graveyard in York," he says. "Experts have since suggested the bite marks may well have been inflicted by a lion, tiger or bear and Channel 4 did a computer generated version of what life might have been like.

"It was great and fabulous publicity for us, but what I want to know is, okay we've found a graveyard, so where was the arena? One question always leads to another and that's the beauty of archaeology, it never stops making you think. York Archaeological Trust has carried out more than 1,000 excavations since it was set up in 1972, but so far we have only uncovered two per cent of the city's archaeology. We have learnt so much, but there is so much more waiting to be discovered."

Whatever happens with the World Heritage bid, that thought alone will keep John occupied for the years to come.

[email protected]