to Truso at the behest of king Alfred the Great. He named the lands and the coasts he had passed as the ship was travelling under sail all the way. Weonodland was on his right and Langland, Laeland, Falster and Sconey on his left, all land that is subject to Denmark. Wulfstan resumes: Then on our left we had the land of the Burgundians, who have a king to themselves. Then, after the land of the Burgundians, we had on our left the lands that have been called from the earliest times Blekingey, and Meore, and Eowland, and Gotland, all which territory is subject to the Sweons; and Weonodland (the land of the Wends) was all the way on our right, as far as the Vistula-estuary.The most sought after commodities of Truso were amber, animal furs and (pagan) slaves, while the industries of blacksmithing and amber working provided processed trading goods. The beginnings of the town has been dated back to approximately the end of the 7th century, while in the second half of the 10th century siltation in the Nogat had begun to cut off the town from the Vistula lagoon and the Baltic Sea. The town's importance as trading port began to decline and was eventually eclipsed by the ascent of Gdańsk as the local trading center, that was situated right by the sea. Historians still debate about the motive for this expedition. King Alfred obviously needed allies in his defense against the Danish and Norwegian Vikings, who had already taken over most of England. However, that reason for the journey is rather unlikely, since Truso was at the time little more than a trading center and Alfred the Great, the West Saxon ruler, already kept in close contact with the continental Saxons and the Franks. Archaeology First attempts at finding the exact location of the town date back to the early sixteenth century. Based on Prussian archaeological finds from 1897 and excavations which began in the 1920s, archaeologists located Truso near Elbing (since 1945 Janów Pomorski near Elbląg). Found artifacts, dating from the 7th to 12th century, were stored in the Elbing Museum, now the Elbląg Museum. In the 1980s, the Polish archaeologist Marek Jagodziński had resumed excavations and cleared a site of circa 20 hectare, in which a series of structures had burnt down around the year 1,000. Trade must have been of great importance at