Occupation Debris: Participatory Practices and Decolonisation of Archaeology in Palestine-Israel
Lead Research Organisation:
DURHAM UNIVERSITY
Department Name: Geography
Abstract
Can displaced communities, who are physically unable to access their ancestral lands, renew a sense of ownership over their tangible cultural heritage and assert their agency over its use? Occupation Debris directly grapples with this challenge and devises new ways to address it. It does so through a participatory process that brings together community members and an international group of scholars. The team will assemble a unique cultural heritage repository of one village devastated by war and neglect, will jointly study this new collection and seek new ways through which it can potentially be used.
Our focus is on one Palestinian village-the Shi'ite village of Qadas in the Galilee region of Israel. During the 1948 Arab-Jewish War, the entire population of the village was forced to flee across the border to Lebanon and were never allowed to return. The village was looted and subsequently razed. In 2020, the first ever archaeological excavation of a destroyed Palestinian village began on the site, bringing to life a new material archive documenting Arab rural history in the region and its abrupt end. However, unlike other contexts where indigenous groups are able to use archaeology to assert agency over their ancestral land, recover their material culture and determine its use, many Palestinians remain displaced beyond the current borders of Israel. In practice, they are unable to access their former homeland, let alone initiate in-situ research processes or reassert ownership over their tangible heritage. They are far from unique: From Somalia to Myanmar, displaced communities around the world face similar challenges.
Occupation Debris seeks practices and tools that can enable displaced communities to remotely reassert their agency over ancestral lands and material heritage. In close collaboration with a group of young descendants of Qadas who reside in Lebanon, the project team assembles a comprehensive historical and material archive of a destroyed Palestinian village, studies its significance, and considers how this archive might be further used as a public resource. We place particular emphasis on the role that younger members of displaced communities ought to be given in cultural heritage research, seeing them as its custodians in the future. Our participatory approach fosters a genuine process for the co-production of knowledge, empowering key stakeholders that have been thus far excluded and emphasising experiences that have been ignored.
The research team comprises geographers, archaeologists, historians and anthropologists, as well as regional researchers and community partners. With scholars from Israel-Palestine, Lebanon and the UK, the project is able to expand the historical and geographical scope of research, reaching communities and repositories that have never been considered together. During a year-long pilot phase, the team reviewed relevant data sources and archives; established preliminary contact with communities in Israel-Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan; and designed a digital platform to facilitate remote participatory research and future dissemination.
The stakes of this project are high. The political and cultural environment in which this research takes place is still laden with suspicion and enmities. Many of the issues we discuss are not consigned to history; for many communities, they remain part of their contemporary challenges. Yet the potential of this project far exceeds its risks: It entails the possibility of opening new scholarly frontiers across cultural geography, contemporary archaeology and settler colonial studies, while devising new pathways for displaced communities across the world to access hard-to-reach cultural heritage, and potentially determine its uses for future generations.
Our focus is on one Palestinian village-the Shi'ite village of Qadas in the Galilee region of Israel. During the 1948 Arab-Jewish War, the entire population of the village was forced to flee across the border to Lebanon and were never allowed to return. The village was looted and subsequently razed. In 2020, the first ever archaeological excavation of a destroyed Palestinian village began on the site, bringing to life a new material archive documenting Arab rural history in the region and its abrupt end. However, unlike other contexts where indigenous groups are able to use archaeology to assert agency over their ancestral land, recover their material culture and determine its use, many Palestinians remain displaced beyond the current borders of Israel. In practice, they are unable to access their former homeland, let alone initiate in-situ research processes or reassert ownership over their tangible heritage. They are far from unique: From Somalia to Myanmar, displaced communities around the world face similar challenges.
Occupation Debris seeks practices and tools that can enable displaced communities to remotely reassert their agency over ancestral lands and material heritage. In close collaboration with a group of young descendants of Qadas who reside in Lebanon, the project team assembles a comprehensive historical and material archive of a destroyed Palestinian village, studies its significance, and considers how this archive might be further used as a public resource. We place particular emphasis on the role that younger members of displaced communities ought to be given in cultural heritage research, seeing them as its custodians in the future. Our participatory approach fosters a genuine process for the co-production of knowledge, empowering key stakeholders that have been thus far excluded and emphasising experiences that have been ignored.
The research team comprises geographers, archaeologists, historians and anthropologists, as well as regional researchers and community partners. With scholars from Israel-Palestine, Lebanon and the UK, the project is able to expand the historical and geographical scope of research, reaching communities and repositories that have never been considered together. During a year-long pilot phase, the team reviewed relevant data sources and archives; established preliminary contact with communities in Israel-Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan; and designed a digital platform to facilitate remote participatory research and future dissemination.
The stakes of this project are high. The political and cultural environment in which this research takes place is still laden with suspicion and enmities. Many of the issues we discuss are not consigned to history; for many communities, they remain part of their contemporary challenges. Yet the potential of this project far exceeds its risks: It entails the possibility of opening new scholarly frontiers across cultural geography, contemporary archaeology and settler colonial studies, while devising new pathways for displaced communities across the world to access hard-to-reach cultural heritage, and potentially determine its uses for future generations.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Noam Leshem (Principal Investigator) | |
| Rui COELHO (Co-Investigator) |
Publications
El Masri Y
(2024)
Return of Objects, Objects of Return
El Masri Y
(2026)
When 'Yes' Means No: Understanding Infiltration as Refusal of Cultural Heritage Research in Palestine
in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Leshem N
(2025)
Settler Toxicity
Leshem N
(2024)
Occupation Debris: Return of Objects, Objects of Return
Leshem N
(2024)
Trying to make criminals out of people who care
Leshem N
(2026)
The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Geographies
Leshem Noam
(2025)
Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land
Noam Leshem
(2025)
Routledge Handbook of Cultural Geographies
| Title | "????? ???? | Your Turn" group exhibition |
| Description | This group exhibition is the outcome of a series of collaborative workshops carried out throughout 2024-25. It brings together a unique collection of artefacts and artistic responses from Palestinians residing in the UK. It is hosted by the art space Kunstraum in London. |
| Type Of Art | Artistic/Creative Exhibition |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Impact | The exhibition is a major community event and an important intervention in broadening public understanding of regional histories in the Middle East as well as providing a space for community to come together at a time of immense turmoil and a growing sense of isolation. |
| Title | Qadas collection |
| Description | A collection of artifacts gathered as part of the Qadas archaeological excavation 2023-2024 |
| Type Of Art | Artefact (including digital) |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Impact | This collection is the first of its kind to be made available to Palestinians in a way that recognizes their agency over cultural heritage and ability to determine its fate. |
| Description | Research Conducted Under Conditions of Violent Conflict: The Occupation Debris project was carried out under some of the most challenging circumstances imaginable. The research team operated throughout a period of intense and ongoing violent conflict across the Middle East, facing conditions that severely constrained conventional academic fieldwork and placed both logistical and personal pressures on everyone involved. Far from providing grounds for reduced ambition, these conditions became the very context within which the project's findings were forged-giving the work an urgency and relevance that would be difficult to replicate under more stable circumstances. Public Exhibition Launched in London, May 2025: Despite the extreme geopolitical pressures bearing on the project, the team successfully launched a public exhibition in London in May 2025. Open to the general public, this exhibition represented a significant achievement in the translation of complex research into accessible, publicly engaged scholarship. Bringing the findings of the project to a broad audience in this way demonstrates the team's commitment not only to academic rigour but to the wider social and cultural relevance of work concerned with occupation, material culture, and memory. Career Development: A measure of the project's success in training and supporting the next generation of researchers is the employment trajectory of both postdoctoral research associates (PDRAs) who worked on the grant. Both individuals have since secured positions at different universities, contributing to the broader academic community and carrying the intellectual legacy of the project forward into new institutional contexts. Particularly noteworthy is the case of one PDRA who is a Palestinian refugee: their appointment to a university post speaks both to their exceptional scholarly ability and to the project's role in providing a meaningful platform for researchers working at the intersection of personal experience, political displacement, and academic inquiry. Ongoing Data Analysis and New Regional Research Collaborations: Analysis of the data gathered through the project is ongoing, and initial findings continue to yield important insights into the material and documentary record of occupation across the region. These findings are already being used as the foundation for establishing new research collaborations across the Middle East and North Africa. This network-building work reflects the project's commitment to situating its scholarship within a regional community of practice, fostering partnerships that will sustain and extend the research agenda beyond the grant period itself. International Workshop at the German Historical Institute, London: The project also successfully convened an international workshop at the German Historical Institute in London. This gathering brought together scholars from a range of disciplines and national contexts to situate the project's findings within the broader discourse on material culture repatriation-a topic of considerable and growing international significance. By anchoring the project's outputs within this wider intellectual and policy conversation, the workshop strengthened the case for the work's long-term impact and established the team as meaningful contributors to a field of global concern. Conclusion: Exceptional Outputs in Exceptional Circumstances: Taken together, the achievements of the Occupation Debris project represent a remarkable body of work delivered against a backdrop of serious and sustained adversity. The combination of violent conflict in the research region, immense limitations on travel, and the near-impossibility of on-the-ground fieldwork would have posed insurmountable obstacles for many projects. That this team has nonetheless produced a public exhibition, supported the career progression of two early-career researchers-including a Palestinian refugee-built new research partnerships across the Middle East and North Africa, and convened an internationally recognised scholarly workshop is a testament to its resilience, creativity, and intellectual rigour. The project has laid foundations that will continue to bear fruit well beyond the formal conclusion of the grant. |
| Exploitation Route | N/A |
| Sectors | Creative Economy |
| Description | The Occupation Debris project has generated tangible real-world impact through sustained engagement with museum professionals and heritage practitioners across three countries. By working directly with practitioners in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada, the project has moved beyond the boundaries of academic scholarship to enter into genuine dialogue with the institutions responsible for holding, interpreting, and potentially returning culturally significant material. These conversations have not been peripheral to the research but central to it, shaping how the project understands the contested afterlives of objects removed from conflict zones. A particular focus of this practitioner engagement has been the joint reflection on practices of material culture repatriation. Museum professionals and researchers have come together to interrogate existing frameworks, share institutional perspectives, and consider what more ethical and equitable approaches to repatriation might look like in practice. This cross-sectoral, international exchange has already begun to influence how participating institutions think about their own collections and responsibilities. At a moment when questions of cultural ownership, colonial legacy, and displaced heritage are at the forefront of global museum debate, the project has positioned itself as a credible and timely voice - bridging research, policy, and professional practice in ways that stand to have lasting institutional consequence. |
| Sector | Creative Economy |
| Impact Types | Cultural Societal |
| Description | Durham Oriental Museum |
| Organisation | Durham University |
| Department | Oriental Museum |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | A series of workshops with Palestinian students on cultural heritage repatriation. Our team led the workshops and the results will contribute to a future exhibition. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Provision of space for the workshops and additional facilities for material storage. |
| Impact | -Workshops and collaborative work toward exhibition in 2027 -collaborative work with Museum staff toward a join grant application in November 2024 |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | German Historical Institute London |
| Organisation | German Historical Institute London |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This collaboration saw a joint hosting of an interdisciplinary workshop in London (March 2025), which discussed the broad range of impacts of repatriation processes in conflict zones |
| Collaborator Contribution | The partner provided financial support to host international scholars, as well as its facilities during the period of the workshop |
| Impact | Untouchable Archives Conference, March 2025 |
| Start Year | 2024 |
| Description | Belongings: Interdisciplinary Approaches. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Dr Noam Leshem was invited to lead a public discussion at the College of Fellows, Tübingen University, on interdisciplinary approaches to the concept of belongings, focusing specifically on questions of cultural heritage repatriation and restitution. The conversation brought together museum practitioners and curators, public sector officials from south-west Germany, scholars and the general public. The roundtable also established a longer-term collaboration between Durham University Institute of Advance Studies and Tübingen University College of Fellows, comprising an exchange and research groups that continue to work on this theme toward joint research and funding bids. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/research/centers-and-institutes/college-of-fellows/focus-groups/belongin... |
| Description | Decolonial Working Group, Durham |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A decolonial working group at the department of geography, Durham University. Presentation by the team. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Qadas visits |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A series of visits hosted by the project team at the Qadas archaeological site in Palestine-Israel. This is the main site where the team is working in on the ground. We hosted local communities, cultural and policy practitioners and offered tours of the site to members of the public. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Seminar Contribution |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Professional workshop on ethnography, peace-building and everyday life |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |