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

Register Here

Please note that all non-Columbia University affiliates must register for a QR campus access code.

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.

The History and Climate Change Workshop invites you to:

Prolonged Drought and Socioecological Transition on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the 16th-17th Centuries

A talk and discussion by Dr. William J. D’Andrea, Lamont Associate Research Professor

Tues., April 14 at 4:30pm 

513 Fayerweather Hall

AIA-Westchester Sponsored Annual CCA Lecture Presents:

Sonya Atalay

(Provost Professor, UMass Amherst Department of Anthropology)

“Braiding New Research Worlds: Archaeology, Storywork & Wellbeing”

Friday, April 24, 2026, 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM

807 Schermerhorn Hall

Register Here

Please note that all non-Columbia University affiliates must register for a QR campus access code.

The seminar will also be available on Zoom

Abstract: In this talk, Dr. Atalay presents her work on a series of land-based research projects with Indigenous communities. Centering Anishinaabe epistemologies and concepts of well-being, she explores how reclaiming traditional knowledge, ancestral remains, Indigenous language, and sacred cultural places can contribute to well-being and healing from historical trauma. Dr. Atalay discusses Indigenous arts-based research and knowledge mobilization methods — such as collaborative comics, storybaskets and counter mapping, and virtual reality applications — as part of Indigenous storywork, demonstrating how lessons drawn from reclaiming tangible and intangible heritage provide a model for imagining decolonized research futures.

Bio: Sonya Atalay is Professor of Anthropology at MIT and Provost Professor in UMass Amherst’s Anthropology Department. She is a public anthropologist and archaeologist who studies Indigenous science protocols, practices and research methods carried out with and for Indigenous communities. Dr. Atalay is the Director and PI of the  Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS), a National Science Foundation funded Science and Technology Center. She has expertise in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and served two terms on the National NAGPRA Review Committee, first appointed by the Bush administration and then for a second term by the Obama administration. Dr. Atalay has produced a series of research-based comics in partnership with Native nations about repatriation of Native American ancestral remains, return of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony under NAGPRA law.