UPDATED: Join us on a journey to the new Jorvik

Jorvik's Vikings, whatever else they were, were clearly not great respecters of human rights.

The ship's three crew members are laughing among themselves, passing a horn of ale around as they unload a cargo of amber from the Baltic and whetstones from Norway onto the wharf.

And what about the slave girl?  She's from Ireland, says one of the three, Knut (aka actor Ross Taylor).  So what will happen to her? The three shrug. "Someone will buy her," says Knut.

If you've been to Jorvik before, you'll recognise Jorvik 2.0.  The 'old' Jorvik has been closed since the Boxing Day floods of 2015. Since then, more than £4 million has been spent on a complete upgrade.

And the 'new' Jorvik? Well, it is clearly the same Viking settlement - just bigger, better, noisier and dirtier. And much more realistic.

Most of the old animatronic Vikings, with their jerky mechanical movements, have gone, for a start. They've been replaced by a new generation of animatronics - and some are breathtakingly real. Like that poor slave girl being bundled over the side of the boat, kicking and struggling for all she's worth. At first I was convinced she was real, an actress. It took several looks before I realised she wasn't.

The new Jorvik is in three parts. 

Buy your ticket, make your way downstairs, and you find yourself in the first gallery, Discover Coppergate. There's a huge glass floor - far bigger than the one regulars will have become familiar with before the flood - beneath which is laid out a recreation of the Coppergate Dig in the late 1970s.

The Discover Coppergate gallery: a glass floor above a recreation of the Coppergate dig

This will be instantly recognisable to anyone who visited the actual dig. It's essentially a sea of mud, but in it you can make out the outline of artefacts the archaeologists were uncovering; tools, bits of bone, the remains of a large timber-framed house.

There are projections of the dig on the walls, and playing on a loop the voices of the real archaeologists who unearthed this unique lost Viking city beneath York - among them Dr Peter Addyman, the first director of the York Archaeological Trust.

You can linger here as long as you want, listening, looking and remembering. But it's just the curtain-raiser, reminding you that the recreated Viking city you're about to visit is based on meticulous research - and is actually located exactly where the real Viking city was.

To get to Jorvik itself, you cross the glass floor, head down a little corridor, and take your place in one of the time cars.

It is a bit like being on the set of Jurassic Park as you lock yourself in: and the anticipation is just as great. There's a touch screen you can tap to get a commentary in the language of your choice. And then, with a slight bump, you're off.

You literally are being taken on a journey back in time. The car moves through utter blackness, while on the screen in front of you the years tick backwards: 1963... 1939...1928 and votes for women... 1914 and the outbreak of the first world war. Back you rush through time: 1851 and the Great Exhibition; the Black Death in 1349; 1066 and all that. And then the chronometer stops at 960AD, and you emerge into the dim light of a Viking morning.

Welcome to Jorvik: Viking hunter and dog

There's a huge, brindled hunting dog snarling at you. Its master, a tall, fair-haired hunter with a bow slung over his shoulder, calls out a greeting. He's clearly speaking Norse, but it sounds oddly like 'Welcome to Jorvik'.

You swing round a corner, to the wharves along the Foss. There's the poor slave girl, being bundled off her ship. Seagulls are calling overhead. The time car noses up a narrow mud lane. Refuse is scattered in the squelching mud of the roadway; two young, coarse-haired pigs are snuffling in a pen.

You pass a comb-maker standing at a worktop outside his wattle-and-daub house. Further up, a tattooed blacksmith is sitting on a bench outside his home, teaching his young son to sharpen knives. The blacksmith is missing part of one finger - a sign he perhaps wasn't that well taught himself.

Father and son: a blacksmith teaches his son to sharpen knives

There's also a cup-maker, using a pedal-powered lathe to turn wooden cups - this may be what gave Coppergate its name, says a recorded voice in your ear: Coppergate means street of the cup-makers. Further on, two workmen are sitting on a wall eating their lunch, taking a break from building a new, wood-plank house of the kind that replaced the old wattle-and-daub ones in the 10th century. Jorvik was clearly going places.

Down by the river again, a blond-haired Viking is gutting a pile of wriggling eels. A hungry cat watches. The Viking's face has been carefully recreated from an actual Viking skull found nearby. 

This Viking fisherman's face has been recreated from a real Viking skull

The time car swoops up from the river, through a house where a woman is weaving cloth on a loom, and out into the main street of Coppergate. Here, all the old animatronic figures have been replaced with new ones: and very real they are. They turn as you approach, and you'd swear they were looking at you. A man sells his wares; a woman dandles a baby in her arms; an older woman with a pain-lined face supports herself on crutches as she tries to cross the street.

A vegetable seller on Coppergate, with his wife and baby

You turn another corner, and enter another house. Here, an old woman is lying, ghostly pale, on her death bed, while a tonsured priest administers the last rites. It's a reminder that Jorvik, in 960, was a city in which the Vikings were beginning to 'go native' and adopt the Christian religion of the Saxons they'd once conquered.

A priest administers the last rites

Further down the street is a familiar sight (and smell) - a large, bushy-bearded Viking straining to relieve himself on the privy. Then there's one final house, in which a storyteller with dark, fanatical eyes sits beside an open fire regaling you with stories from the Norse myths - including the tale of Ragnarok, the last battle.

And then, after 16 minutes, the time car leaves Jorvik behind and you emerge, blinking, into the third of the three galleries that make up the attraction.

Here, displayed behind smart new glass cases, are some of the 40,000 artefacts unearthed during the Coppergate dig. They include a neatly-stitched woollen slipper; three skeletons, two laid out in the coffins in which they were buried; fragments of musical instruments, including a flute made out of the leg-bone of a swan; bowls and coins and tools and some fossilised Viking poo. All the myriad everyday objects that helped make up Viking life, in fact.

Sarah Maltby, Jorvik's director of attractions, with the new stained glass panel depicting invading Vikings

There's also a new stained glass panel, made by the York Glaziers Trust, depicting boatloads of Viking warriors disembarking ready for a raid; a carved reproduction of a Christian Viking cross, with a Viking warrior on one side and a serpent on the other (the original is in St Andrew's Church in Middleton, Ryedale); and perhaps most poignantly of all a 3-D interactive CAT scan of the skeleton of an elderly Viking woman found nearby.

She was in her late 40s or older when she died, and she'd suffered all her life from a congenital deformity which meant her right leg was virtually useless. That old woman with crutches trying to cross the street in Coppergate when your time car passed earlier - she was based on a real woman...

Old woman crossing Coppergate: based on a real woman

For Sarah Maltby, The York Archaeological Trust's director of attraction who has overseen the restoration of Jorvik, the last 16 months have been frantic.  But the results are everything she'd hoped for, she says. "It really is more or less what I saw in my head."

Jorvik lovers should not be disappointed.

• Jorvik opens to the public on Saturday at 10am. Tickets (£10.25 for adults, £8.25 for concessions and £7.25 for children) can be pre-booked at the new website, www.jorvikvikingcentre.co.uk.