The classic image of an archaeologist is of someone unearthing a potsherd in Pompeii or opening a Viking grave to better understand the distant past. Yet the same methods can also be applied to our own time - a field known as contemporary archaeology.
"Just like classical archaeology, contemporary archaeology focuses on material culture and on material sources, alongside written ones," says Per Ditlef Fredriksen, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Oslo.
Contemporary archaeologists do not only examine the object itself, or fragments of it; they also study how it is made, who makes it, and how it is used.
"We gain a different perspective on the present. We collaborate extensively with social anthropologists, but also with historians, ethnographers and human geographers, and we complement each other very well," says Fredriksen.
Forced relocations in Zimbabwe
In recent years, Fredriksen has travelled several times to southern Zimbabwe as part of the research project ARCREATE - An Archaeological Study of Creative Knowledge in Turbulent Times. There, together with locally based research colleagues, he has conducted fieldwork among people who have more or less voluntarily moved away from the areas where they originally lived.
"We gain a very concrete bottom-up perspective on major events, on broad political currents, and we gain insight into the everyday lives of people who are being forcibly relocated.
"Many have written about this, but most have overlooked those who actually built everything in the new place. And those are women," says Fredriksen.
In what is now Zimbabwe, large population groups have been repeatedly forced to move ever since the colonial period, but contemporary archaeologists have focused on three more recent waves. The first took place under the Mugabe regime around the turn of the millennium. The second involved people who voluntarily moved away from the area of a planned dam project in 2010. The third wave came four years later and consisted of people who were forcibly relocated after a flood linked to the same dam project.
People from the three waves are now settled in designated areas close to one another. This gives Fredriksen and his colleagues a unique opportunity to see how people adapt to a new life in different ways - particularly the most recent wave, which has been allocated much less space than the first two.
"Before they moved, they were promised fairly large plots of land, four to five hectares. They ended up with small plots of barely one hectare. And that is nothing," says Fredriksen.
Women hold the crucial knowledge
It is not only that they have less space. They must also learn how to use different materials and resources.
"When you are forcibly relocated, you can bring all the knowledge you like. But you are still entirely dependent on the kinds of raw materials and resources that are available to you," says Fredriksen.
Where they once knew exactly where to go to find what they needed to make bricks and cooking pots, they now must adapt their methods and techniques to materials with slightly different properties. Fredriksen has studied these processes at close hand.
"We spend a great deal of time making sure we understand the local hierarchy and on building trust, especially with those who possess a lot of knowledge. It is also important to work with many different people and to return multiple times, so that a mutual relationship of trust develops over a long period," he explains.
Women are easily overlooked if one focuses only on written sources and official power structures, but here they step clearly into view. It is the women who are responsible for the craftwork.
"The women have extensive knowledge of the landscape they came from, which they then try to transfer to a new place. They have reactivated a latent knowledge that was not needed where they previously lived.
"Suddenly, these women were the ones who knew everything that needed to be known in the new location - how to build houses that keep you warm, how to make containers for cooking food, and how to construct stoves for preparing meals," says Fredriksen.
Tracing the history of craft
Through multiple long-term visits and by building trust, the researchers have been able to study these craft practices at close range.
"We look at the way they shape things. We look at how they decorate them. The next, and perhaps most important, question is where they learned this," says Fredriksen.
In this way, he pieces together a kind of genealogy of craft. But it is not family lineages or royal successions he is mapping. Rather, it is a sort of family tree of building and craft traditions that can be traced far back in time.
Along the way, the researchers also refine their methods - knowledge that can in turn be transferred to other archaeological studies.
"We have done the same with early ironworking in Norway, dating from around the 6th century. We can isolate craft traditions, piece them together and create genealogies - not of which people are related, but of which material cultures are related," says Fredriksen.
Defiance and adaptation
Patiently, the researchers add layer upon layer to the story. They weave an increasingly fine-meshed network of craft practices, and they observe how, in particular, the most recent wave of displaced people in Zimbabwe adapts to its new situation. They see how, through their craft among other things, people express defiance while also preparing for future displacements.
"They have been told that they are not allowed to build permanent structures, but they have ignored this. They protest by making themselves permanent in a place where they are not supposed to," says Fredriksen.
At the same time, the most recent arrivals are not putting down roots in the same way as the first two waves, even though they live in the same broader area.
"The newcomers did not take part in community life in the same way. They kept to themselves, did not participate in the market, and showed no interest in selling their goods," says Fredriksen.
Crucially, they seem acutely aware that their stay is only temporary, and that new relocation processes may be forced upon them.
"Because they have been forcibly moved, they do not have houses and graves that can demonstrate the presence of their ancestors. They have not left their forebears behind there. Instead, they have developed a mobile material culture related to ancestors, so that they are prepared to be moved again later."
The situation in southern Zimbabwe is not unique. Every year, millions of people are driven or forced to flee. Fredriksen believes that contemporary archaeology can shed new and important light on the challenges they face.
"We can see what everyday life is like in such places, how people create a new future for themselves. Without us, this story would not have been written," he says.
Reference
Per Ditlef Fredriksen and Foreman Bandama, Memory Work in Mud, Stone and Wood: Material Knowledges in Turbulent Times in Southern Africa, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, December 2025.
