About

The Currently Occupied Rural Settlement (CORS) project, directed by Professor Carenza Lewis, began in 2005, running initially at the University of Cambridge and since 2015 at the University of Lincoln. It aims to advance knowledge and understanding of the ways in which rural settlements that are still inhabited today developed in the past by carrying out a wide-ranging programme of carefully targeted systematic small-scale ‘test pit’ excavations within and across a number of sites in England. A mini-lecture explaining the process used to carry out one of these archaeological test pit excavations can be found here (this is one of a series of online learning workshops, many based on the processes used to research and interpret medieval settlements).

The CORS project was designed to redress past biases in rural settlement research which had previously focused mostly on the small minority of sites which are now deserted (called deserted medieval villages or DMVs). The CORS project aimed to focus on medieval settlements are still inhabited today in order that understanding can be based on a more representative range of sites.

Over 13 years, more than 2500 test pits have been excavated in villages, hamlets and farms in more than 75 UK parishes. In each of these, new foci of occupation have been identified, and successive phases of activity within and around today’s villages and farms have been dated, characterised and mapped so that the historic development of excavated settlements can be reconstructed. One example is Pirton in Hertfordshire where the test pit data revealed two unknown Romano-British settlements, their post-Roman abandonment and replacement by a large medieval settlement to which a castle was added but which shrank by two thirds after demographic catastrophes of the fourteenth century and took more than 400 years to recover its former size.

Pirton, Hertfordshire from the air showing the extent of the village today
A test pit under excavation in Pirton
Pottery (black circles) found in test pits in Pirton from 6 historic periods, showing how the settlement moved around over more than 1500 years (black circles show test pits with pottery, white squares show pits without). Top left = Roman; top centre = early Anglo-Saxon; top right = late Anglo-Saxon; bottom left = high medieval; bottom centre = late medieval; bottom right = post-medieval.

Beyond the scores of individual case studies the CORS project has provided, analysing the synthesised data from all the different settlements is generating exciting new perspectives on major historical events and demographic changes over time, including providing entirely new evidence for the impact of the fourteenth century Black Death plague pandemic at a range of scales.

Graph showing changes in the percentage of excavated test pits with pottery, with the sharp drop after the Black Death (between the high and late medieval) clearly apparent.

Methodologically, the CORS project has highlighted the extent to which valuable medieval artefacts and deposits can survive within currently occupied rural settlements – this might otherwise seem unlikely, because there is so much modern disturbance from more recent building, services on so on.

The CORS research has been publicly engaged from its inception, with more than ten thousand members of the public involved in carrying out or supporting the excavations. A very important aspect of this research is the way it has advance our knowledge and understanding of the societal benefits of public participation in research.

The success of the Currently Occupied Rural Settlement (CORS) project in helping reconstructing local, national and global histories has encouraged thousands of people across the UK to get involved in test pit excavations in their own communities, and the approach is now being extended into Europe.