The project was the brainchild of George Zarnecki who arrived in the United Kingdom in 1943 before spending his career at the Courtauld Institute of Art, retiring in 1982 as a professor and Deputy Director.
Throughout his career he kept his work on handwritten file cards, one or more for each site he visited, and after his retirement he set about establishing a similarly systematic approach to the whole of the British Isles using volunteers to complete a comprehensive Corpus.
The first chairman was Professor Peter Lasko, ex-Director of the Courtauld Institute, and the stated aim was ‘to photograph and record in a searchable database all of the surviving stone sculpture produced c.1066 - c.1200 in Britain and Ireland’.
[6] Volunteer fieldworkers, many of them Zarnecki's former students, were recruited for Scotland, Wales, and each of the English counties and a team led by Professor Roger Stalley of Trinity College Dublin undertook to record the Irish material.
The British Academy suggested that the only hope for publishing the fieldwork lay in computing, and supplied an expert to help in Seamus Ross, the digital humanities researcher, who encouraged the project team to archive the text reports and digitised photographs separately.