Occupation Debris: Participatory Practices and Decolonisation of Archaeology in Palestine-Israel

无法进入祖先土地的流离失所社区能否重新树立对其有形文化遗产的所有权意识，并对其使用行使自己的权力？Occupation Debris直接应对这一挑战，并设计出新的解决方法。它通过将社区成员和国际学者团体聚集在一起的参与性过程来实现这一目标。该团队将在一个被战争和忽视摧毁的村庄建立一个独特的文化遗产库，并将共同研究这些新藏品，并寻求新的方法来利用它们。我们的重点是一个巴勒斯坦村庄——位于以色列加利利地区的什叶派村庄卡达斯。在1948年阿拉伯-犹太战争期间，该村的全部人口被迫越过边境逃往黎巴嫩，并且从未被允许返回。这个村庄被洗劫一空，随后被夷为平地。2020年，对一个被摧毁的巴勒斯坦村庄的首次考古发掘工作在该遗址开始，为记录该地区阿拉伯农村历史及其突然结束的新材料档案带来了生机。然而，与其他情况不同的是，土著群体能够利用考古学来主张对其祖先土地的代理，恢复其物质文化并确定其用途，许多巴勒斯坦人仍然在以色列目前的边界之外流离失所。在实践中，他们无法进入他们以前的家园，更不用说发起实地研究进程或重申对其有形遗产的所有权。这种情况远非个例：从索马里到缅甸，世界各地的流离失所社区都面临着类似的挑战。“占领碎片”寻求能够使流离失所的社区远程重申其对祖先土地和物质遗产的代理的实践和工具。项目团队与居住在黎巴嫩的一群年轻的Qadas后裔密切合作，收集了一个被摧毁的巴勒斯坦村庄的全面历史和材料档案，研究了它的意义，并考虑如何将这些档案进一步用作公共资源。我们特别强调流离失所社区的年轻成员应该在文化遗产研究中发挥作用，将他们视为未来的监护人。我们的参与式方法促进了一个真正的共同生产知识的过程，赋予迄今为止被排除在外的关键利益相关者权力，并强调被忽视的经验。研究小组包括地理学家、考古学家、历史学家和人类学家，以及区域研究人员和社区合作伙伴。与来自以色列-巴勒斯坦、黎巴嫩和英国的学者合作，该项目能够扩大研究的历史和地理范围，触及从未被考虑在一起的社区和知识库。在为期一年的试点阶段，该小组审查了有关的数据来源和档案；与以色列-巴勒斯坦、黎巴嫩和约旦社区建立初步联系；并设计了一个数字平台，以促进远程参与式研究和未来传播。这个项目的风险很大。进行这项研究的政治和文化环境仍然充满怀疑和敌意。我们讨论的许多问题都不是历史遗留下来的；对许多社区来说，它们仍然是当代挑战的一部分。然而，这个项目的潜力远远超过了它的风险：它有可能在文化地理学、当代考古学和定居者殖民研究领域开辟新的学术前沿，同时为世界各地流离失所的社区设计新的途径，使他们能够接触到难以接触到的文化遗产，并有可能确定其对后代的利用。

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.