Department of Archaeology

People

Carenza Rachel Lewis

Affiliated Lecturer and Director, Access Cambridge Archaeology

Office: G04, Faculty Building. Phone: +44 (0) 1223 761518
Fax: +44 (0) 1223 333503. Email: crl29@cam.ac.uk
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Carenza Lewis has been teaching in the Department since 1999, having previously been an archaeological investigator for the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of England (RCHME). During that period she carried out analytical field investigations of monuments and landscapes ranging in date from the Neolithic (Avebury Henge) to the Second World War (Mulberry Harbour construction site, Lepe), focussing particularly on the archaeological and historical evidence for the medieval landscape of Wessex, and in particular the development of the rural settlement pattern.

In 1992 she was appointed to the Leverhulme Trust-funded post-doctoral research project at Birmingham University into the origins of the medieval settlement pattern of the East Midlands, a post she carried out on secondment from RCHME. In 1993 she was selected to be one of the archaeological presenters of Time Team, the innovative and long-running award-winning Channel 4 archaeological series then about to start filming. This series has now been running for 12 years and has broadcast more then 150 programmes following original excavation and archaeological research, repeatedly breaking new ground in its format and presentation of the process of archaeological investigation to the general public.

On her return to RHCME from Birmingham University in 1994 Carenza Lewis refined the methodology of the East Midlands work in a top-down investigative analysis of the medieval settlement evidence for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. In 1999 she moved from Wessex to Cambridgeshire, leaving RCHME (then merging with English Heritage) to combine expanding media work with teaching in Corpus Christi College and the Department of Archaeology in Cambridge. Between 2000 and 2002 she presented television series on BBC 2, BBC Knowledge and HTV, on various aspects of archaeology. Since 2001 she has been an affiliated lecturer teaching medieval archaeology in the Department of Archaeology in Cambridge. In 2004 she was appointed to the Department to promote undergraduate archaeology at Cambridge and beyond as part of a programme of widening access to higher education among under-represented groups. The resulting initiative, Access Cambridge Archaeology, is now operating across the country and is investigating and developing new ways of promoting an interest in archaeology as an academic subject and includes the HEFA programme which uses archaeology to widen participation in higher education more generally.