Brian Boyd & Mazen Iwaisi

“From Memory to Place: An Archaeology of the Nakba“

Friday, April 10, 2026, 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM

807 Schermerhorn Hall

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The seminar will also be available on Zoom

Abstract

There has been extensive research into what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe) in a number of academic disciplines, including history, oral history, memory studies, and cultural studies. Palestinian archaeologists have rarely focused on the material remains of – the material evidence for – the historical and contemporary processes of the Nakba. To address the reasons for this, and to offer a way forward, we have recently instigated the project “From Memory to Place: An Archaeology of the Nakba”, an interdisciplinary endeavor that focuses on the fundamental changes in the materiality of landscape inhabitation in the processes of the ongoing Nakba. Using archaeological methodologies that explore the spatial reordering (and destruction) of material conditions – through forced displacement, abandonment and movement – the project aims to demonstrate the importance of contemporary archaeological perspectives to Nakba Studies.

Bios

Mazen Iwaisi is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University. He is working on his first book project, Anticolonial Archaeology? Epistemic Precarity and Palestinian Archaeology. He earned his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast (2023), examining the concept of Archaeopolitics in the Making of the Palestinian National Spatial Plan. Mazen is currently working with Brian Boyd, Jamal Barghouth, and other scholars on the Archaeology of the Nakba project.

Brian Boyd is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, Director of Museum Anthropology, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. His research focuses on the prehistoric archaeology of southwest Asia, the politics of archaeology in Palestine and Israel, and critical human-animal studies. His articles have appeared recently in the journals Jerusalem Quarterly and American Anthropologist. He is currently co-writing a book with Mazen Iwaisi and Jamal Barghouth entitled From Memory to Place: An Archaeology of the Nakba.