The University of Cambridge Currently Occupied Rural Settlement (CORS) project
The Currently Occupied Rural Settlement (CORS) project is based in the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. It aims to advance knowledge and understanding of the ways in which rural settlements that are still inhabited today developed in the past by carrying out a wide ranging programme of carefully targeted systematic small-scale excavations within and across a number of sites in England. This is enabling successive phases of activity within and around today's villages and farms to be identified, dated, characterised and mapped so that the historic development of settlement in the targeted parishes can be reconstructed. The CORS project is designed to redress past biases in research into rural settlement, which focused mostly on the small minority of sites which are now deserted, in favour of the still-inhabited majority, in order that understanding can be based on a more representative range of sites.
Scores of sites which are currently occupied by villages, hamlets and farms in more that 25 parishes are included in the CORS project. In each of these, new foci of occupation have been identified and dated, and new ideas about the development of the settlement proposed, while the excavations have also highlighted the extent to which undisturbed medieval levels can survive within currently-occupied rural settlements.
Click here for details of the CORS project methods
Click here for details of the CORS project results to date