Q:

Fork maintain and distribute a MIT project

Given a project which is under MIT, has been archived, can it be forked, restarted the dev and be redistributed/renamed? 

A:

The project's license says: 

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software... to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so...

This means that you may distribute the software further, modified or unmodified, and other downstream recipients may do so as well.  This is all that is required to maintain a fork.