President, 2021-23

Carenza Lewis MA ScD FSA FHEA has carried out fieldwork and research into medieval settlements for thirty years, and has been a member of MSRG since it was founded in 1986.

Having grown up in rural Norfolk, as an undergraduate at Cambridge she was taught by Chris Taylor and was inspired by him to specialise in medieval rural settlement. She has remained active in this field throughout a diverse archaeological career starting as an investigator with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England surveying deserted and shrunken settlements in western England, and a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Birmingham looking at medieval settlement development in the east midlands, during which time she was also a presenter on Channel 4’s Time Team. She then moved to become a lecturer in medieval archaeology and director of Access Cambridge Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, where she involved thousands of members of the public in her test pit excavations investigating the development of currently occupied rural settlements (CORS) in eastern England. She is now Professor for the Public Understanding of Research at the University of Lincoln where she is leading several projects including ‘Community Archaeology in Rural Environments’ involving members of the public in the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland and UK in excavations investigating medieval rural settlements.