A new exhibition opening at the University of Nottingham Museum is bringing together decades of archaeological work along the River Trent, one of Britain's most extensively studied river valleys. Prehistoric Lives in the Trent Valley, curated by researchers from York Archaeology, draws on artefacts, pollen samples, animal remains and layers of sediment recovered from sites across the valley, built up through years of fieldwork tracking how prehistoric communities settled, adapted and left their mark on a landscape that was constantly reshaped by the river itself. Among the finds featured is a Bronze Age log boat pulled from a quarry near Shardlow in Derbyshire, one of the clearest physical traces of how people used the Trent thousands of years before written records existed. This unusual partnership between industry and archaeology shows how ongoing commercial work, rather than disrupting heritage sites, can sometimes become the very mechanism through which buried history steadily resurfaces for study.
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