Carenza Lewis

Carenza Rachel Lewis (born c. 1964) is a British archaeologist who became famous as a result of her appearances on the Channel 4 television series "Time Team".

Educated at the University of Cambridge, in 1985 she joined the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (now part of English Heritage) as a field archaeologist for Wessex. During part of her time with the RCHME she was seconded to the History Department of the University of Birmingham to research the relationship between settlement and landscape in the East Midlands. She followed this with a similar project for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Since 1999 she has been teaching archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 2004 she took on a new post at Cambridge to promote undergraduate archaeology, and created Access Cambridge Archaeology. [ [http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/ Access Cambridge Archaeology] ]

In 1993 she joined the team creating the first "Time Team" series, shown in 1994. The success of "Time Team" encouraged the production of other programmes in similar formats, such as "House Detectives" by the BBC. In 2002 "House Detectives at Large" starred Carenza Lewis with architectural historian Dan Cruickshank. She also devised and presented a series called "Sacred Sites" for HTV. She left Time Team after series 12, filmed in 2004.

Carenza Lewis is widely admired for going public about her experience when she was wrongly diagnosed with breast cancer by Dr. James Elwood in 1997 and had an unnecessary double mastectomy. [ [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/05/04/ncerv304.xml "Daily Telegraph"] ]

Works

*Mick Aston and Carenza Lewis (eds.), "The Medieval Landscape of Wessex" (Oxford: Oxbow, 1994).
*Carenza Lewis, Patrick Mitchell-Fox and Christopher Dyer "Village, Hamlet and Field: Changing Medieval Settlements in Central England" (Manchester University Press, 1997).
*Carenza Lewis, Phil Harding and Mick Aston, ed. Tim Taylor, "Time Team's Timechester: A companion to archaeology" (London: Macmillan, 2000).
*Alan Aberg and Carenza Lewis (eds.) "The Rising Tide: Archaeology and Coastal Landscapes" (Oxford: Oxbow 2000).

References

External links

* [http://www.channel4.com/history/timeteam/biog_carenza.html Carenza Lewis: profile from Channel 4]
* [http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~crl29/ Carenza Lewis's Home Page at the University of Cambridge]
* [http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/ Access Cambridge Archaeology]
* [http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianeducation/story/0,,313584,00.html My inspiration: Carenza Lewis talks to the Guardian]