Professor Carenza Lewis (University of Lincoln, UK) is Professor for the Public Understanding of Research and an archaeologist specialising in rural settlement with a strong track record in community archaeology and media. She brings to CARE-MSoC her knowledge, skills and experience in working with communities carrying out test pit excavation within inhabited villages. Formerly founding director of an archaeological outreach unit at the University of Cambridge, she has directed scores of archaeological fieldwork projects and has a wealth of experience which includes devising successful wide-ranging programmes to raise academic aspirations, develop transferrable skills, boost personal well-being, develop social capital in communities and advance public engagement with heritage. In the UK she has been responsible for the excavation of more than 2,500 test pits over ten years and has played a major role in establishing TPE as an approach to archaeological research which is both popular with wider publics and valued for research. Her TPE data have advanced knowledge of the development 60+ historic rural communities (Lewis 2014) and in aggregate have provided a model for addressing bigger questions such as the impact of the Black Death on rural communities (Lewis 2016). Simultaneously she has championed the use of more robust approaches to evaluating the impact of participating in heritage-related research on participants and led by example in developing assessment frameworks in collaboration with specialists in education and publishing the social outcomes of programmes (eg Lewis 2014).
Public participation in archaeological discovery supporting rural communities across Europe
