ARCHAEOLOGISTS investigating York's Viking past have discovered exciting new evidence which shows our ancient ancestors had their heads in the clouds.

Dr Richard Hall, of York Archaeological Trust, who directed the original Coppergate dig 20 years ago, has discovered Vikings lived in two-storey buildings, the likes of which had not been seen since Roman times. He is giving a lecture about the archaeological discoveries which have been made since the original Jorvik Viking Centre was built in the early 80s as York Archaeological Trust prepares to close the museum in a month's time for a complete revamp.

The lecture, High-Rise Vikings, will describe some of the discoveries about Viking architecture which will be featured in the new Jorvik Viking Centre when it reopens.

Dr Hall said: "We're gearing up for the revamp which will take advantage of the last 20 years of research and technological advances and enable us to be even more accurate about what it was all about.

"We have a collection of wonderfully preserved plank buildings sunk into the ground standing six-feet high in some places. We had these wonderful buildings, but the question was, what did they look like above ground."

"If you look carefully inside the present museum, what you see is that we hedged our bets and made a number of different reconstructions from semi-subterranean through to various larger and taller buildings.

"What we've done since 1982 and 1983 is spent some time thinking about these buildings and why they were built the way they were.

"In the new Viking centre mark two, we're going to have something completely different - it's going to be a case of 'swipe me guv'.

"We now think there were two-storey buildings which is very radical because for hundreds and hundreds of years nobody had been building structures like this, and all of a sudden in the late tenth century these people were."

High-Rise Vikings, will be held tomorrow at 12.30pm in the Tempest Anderson Hall, Museum Gardens, and will last for half-an-hour.