The Palestinian Rural History Project

The Palestinian Rural History Project (PRHP), established in 2014, is an ethnographic fieldwork and oral history preservation initiative with a focus on Palestinian rural history and heritage since the late Ottoman period. The PRHP aims to document, preserve, study and publish culturally and scientifically important information concerning Palestine’s rural history and heritage. The corpus contains over 1,400 personally-conducted oral history interviews documenting the local body of knowledge of some 700 Palestinian communities, consisting of 65% of all inhabited places in Mandatory Palestine. It encompasses rare and invaluable information about Palestine’s historical geography, genealogies, toponymy, archaeology, nature, economy, politics, agricultural practices, traditions and lore. Lastly, it also holds, inter alia, over a century’s worth of personal stories and recollections of life under Ottoman, British, Jordanian and Israeli rule.