Trent Valley GeoArchaeology

The Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Occupation of the Middle and Lower Trent Catchment and Adjacent Areas

English Heritage has provided over £140,000 worth of funding to the Universities of Durham and Birmingham to investigate the Palaeolithic heritage of the Trent Valley and adjacent areas.

The River Trent is the most northerly river in Britain, and indeed Europe, to have yielded from its Pleistocene sediments significant Palaeolithic assemblages.  The potential of this system to elucidate aspects of hominin adaptation on the extreme fringes of their range is therefore considerable.

• To review available collections of Palaeolithic artefacts from fluvial sites throughout the area.

• To monitor operational gravel quarries to assess the benefits of detailed long-term monitoring versus rapid archaeological assessment.

• To record the Quaternary palaeoenvironmental evidence from operational gravel quarries.

• To record Quaternary palaeoenvironmental evidence from selected historical sites.

• To feed results of this project into both the county-based Sites and Monuments Records (SMR) and into other statutory and non-statutory conservation strategies.

• Dissemination of the findings to the science and wider community via outreach activities.

• To provide a high quality dataset of both cultural and environmental evidence that will allow the Palaeolithic archaeology of the Trent Valley to be placed within a secure stratigraphic framework and compared with other UK Palaeolithic artefact records.

Drs Mark White (M.J.White@durham.ac.uk) and David Bridgland (d.r.bridgland@durham.ac.uk) at Durham and Dr Andy Howard (A.J.Howard@bham.ac.uk) at Birmingham will lead the project.  Mr Tom White (t.s.white@durham.ac.uk) has been appointed as a Research Assistant.

A summary project design is available for download (2mb download, Adobe pdf format)