Carenza Lewis

British archaeologist Dr Carenza Lewis has become a familiar face on the Channel 4 television series Time Team.

Educated at Cambridge University, in 1985 she joined the Royal Commission on the Historic 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 Birmingham University 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.

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 Sacred Sites for HTV.

Carenza Lewis is widely admired for going public about her experience when she was wrongly diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997 and had an unnecessary double mastectomy.

She is now Preceptor in Archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Works

• Michael Aston and Carenza Lewis (eds.), The Medieval Landscape of Wessex (Oxbow: Oxford 1994).
• Carenza Lewis, 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 2000).

External links

• Carenza Lewis: profile from Channel 4