As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said (and Disney’s Pocahontas sang 2,500 years later), ‘you can’t step in the same river twice’. Just as flowing water constantly renews itself, though, the courses of rivers also change and shift over time, shaping landscapes and the lives of the people who live within them. The River Trent is a case in point. Today, it is one of the longest rivers in the United Kingdom, flowing from its source on Staffordshire’s Biddulph Moor to the Humber Estuary, where it joins the River Ouse and enters the North Sea. Its current appearance as a single watercourse is only a relatively recent development, however, which emerged after the end of the last Ice Age. Prior to that, its story enters murkier waters, with competing hypotheses proposing different forms, but LiDAR images have proven an invaluable addition to aerial photos in picking out long-vanished river channels and helping to interpret the Trent’s more recent incarnations.
During the early Mesolithic period, around 10,000 BC, the Trent Valley is thought to have been home to extensive wetlands threaded with dense mixed woodland. Then, over subsequent centuries, the course of these waterways changed and consolidated, while increasingly intense human occupation within the valley transformed the surrounding landscape through tree-clearance, agriculture, and construction. A wide-ranging exhibition currently running at the University of Nottingham Museum (see ‘Further information’ below) traces this long story of interaction and evolution, combining excavated environmental evidence and artefacts reflecting the successive communities who called the Trent Valley home through prehistory.
Wild woods and winding waters
Prehistoric Lives in the Trent Valley begins long before the Mesolithic landscape described above (more reminiscent of northern Canada than the modern Midlands, the exhibition’s curators note) came into being. The earliest evidence for a human presence in the Trent Valley dates to around 300,000 BC, in the form of stone handaxes created by nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers who came in search of prey and useful resources. Other than stone implements, they did not leave much of a mark on the landscape that they moved through. These handaxes are generally not found where they had originally been dropped or deposited: their heavily worn appearance speaks of them travelling long distances, borne by glacial meltwater. Many examples have been recovered during modern gravel-extraction works, and quarrying companies have made a key contribution to our understanding of the area’s archaeology, not only uncovering long-buried finds but also funding numerous developer-led excavations. Most of the objects in the exhibition stem from investigations by York Archaeology over the last 30 years.
The privatisation of objects