About the project
The project known as ARCREATE aims to provide a synthesis of two African regions: a millennium in central Africa (AD 500-1500) and a century in southern Africa (AD 1700-1830). Although distant, the regions are historically related through migrations.
The project is driven by a deep discomfort with archaeology’s grand narratives of migration, particularly of the expansions of Bantu-speaking groups from central and southern Africa since the first millennium BC.
By its focus on skilled craft networks dominated by women, the project provides a critical ground-up corrective to traditional top-down grand narratives that trace the movements and interactions of (male) elites.
ARCREATE strives for symmetric collaboration with local African stakeholder communities. ARCREATE challenges preconceived modernist notions about mobility, migration, creativity, and transmission of knowledge in African societies.
The project employs a new long-term approach to technological and social change. ARCREATE combines archaeological, archaeometallurgical, historical and linguistic evidence in order to understand the role of the mineral world in various landscapes. To achieve this, the team has developed a new cross-disciplinary fieldwork methodology that allows ARCREATE to identify and interpret changes in creative knowledge in contexts of mobility and turbulence.
Duration
01.10.2023 - 30.09.2028
Financing
The Research Council of Norway, Researcher Project for Scientific Renewal, Project No. 334377
Cooperation
- Georgetown University (USA)
- The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago (USA)
- Livingstone Museum (Zambia)
- University of Pretoria (South Africa)
- University of Cape Town (South Africa)