After touring south-east England over the last few months, then taking a diversion into the world of ship archaeology, I will now be turning my eyes to the East Midlands in my next few columns, examining CA’s coverage of first Nottinghamshire, then Lincolnshire, and finally Leicestershire. By way of an introduction, I note that I explored one of the oldest and most important archaeological sites partly in Nottinghamshire in a previous edition of the magazine, when I mentioned Creswell Crags during my tour of Derbyshire in CA 369 (December 2020). Creswell is an extraordinary archaeological site that is cared for by a great team, and I cannot recommend a visit there highly enough.
The Trent through time
Moving back in time to the early history of Current Archaeology, issue 26 (May 1971) featured the Trent Valley Archaeological Project (which spanned more than just the Trent in Nottinghamshire). This was one of several landscape surveys undertaken across the UK at this time in response to a rapid growth in mineral extraction. Such work was undertaken long before ‘polluter pays’ principles were even a glint in future archaeologists’ eyes, and when, instead, volunteer workforces had to be deployed to rescue what data they could. As the report outlines, an immense quantity of evidence was collected over a three-year period from fieldwalking, survey and excavation, and aerial photography, feeding into the early origins of what became Sites and Monuments Records (SMRs – later, Historic Environment Records, HERs) for these counties.
CA 74 (November 1980) returned to the Trent in the first of three reports featuring the work of another redoubtable ‘amateur’ archaeologist of this time and place: a former GP named Christopher Salisbury, who lived in Nottingham and led a range of fieldwork along the river that won him the Pitt Rivers Award (now part of the British Archaeology Awards) in 1994. CA 74 focused on Salisbury’s work at Colwick near Nottingham, where careful examination of over 50 acres (20ha) of floodplain revealed phases of Saxon, Norman, and Tudor fishing weirs. CA 140 and 145 (November 1994 and November 1995) later reported on spectacular medieval finds made by Salisbury at Hemington Fields in nearby Leicestershire, which I will return to in a future column.
The Fifth Shanghai Archaeology Forum