Experimental archaeology is a scientific approach which belongs to the Archaeology domain. It aims to explains how people from back then used objects or built a house. With the support of excavations, or with the help of historic archives, this experimentation allows you to better understand they living condition of a period. It allows scientists to confirm the use and fabrication method of an object or house. With buildings' construction, clothes' manufacturing, gardens' creation, battles' staging, experimental archaeology can create an accurate and vivid image of what women and men used to know during a chosen period.

Ornavik Park emerged when Christian Sébire visited another site of experimental archaeology, The Castle of Guédelon, in Yonne. The future founder of the Association « Les Vikings An 911 » saw it as an inspiration to create this Park dedicated to Normandy's birth.

The Park offers this perspective of an accurate reconstruction of buildings and techniques from the 10^th and 11^th century, allowing you to learn more, in a fun and practical way, about the birth of the norman region.

Our scientific committee, composed of archaeologists and historians, advises the Association's team, and always validate construction projects and stagings in the Park before their launch, like the farm or the carolingian church.

Our goal is to show you what a medieval village looked like, in reality. Our teams went into this crazy wager of taking inspiration from Saint-Martin-de-Trainecourt, a carolingian village from the Plains of Caen of the Early Middle-Ages, situated nowadays on the municipality of Mondeville, near Caen.

You can discover the daily life of this Era's population, with the help of our volunteers who reclaimed construction of objects and ancient techniques (such as pottery, carpentry, shipbuilding, forge, cooking, garden...) and aim to show them to you.