The Palestinian Rural History Project: Official Gazetteer of Documented Localities (2026)

Established in 2014, the Palestinian Rural History Project (PRHP) is an independent, non-institutional research initiative devoted to documenting, preserving, studying, and publishing knowledge concerning the rural history and heritage of Palestine and the southern Levant. The PRHP is the largest non-institutional rural-history archive in the region and possesses the widest spatial coverage. It encompasses more than 1,100 Arab localities documented through over 2,500 oral-history interviews. Repeated sessions with the same narrator are counted collectively as one interview.

Striving for the most comprehensive documentation attainable, the PRHP has recorded testimonies relating to 85 percent of the Palestinian inhabited sites in the Palestine Remembered dataset, as consulted on 9 August 2026. It has also documented 43 percent of the Syrian inhabited sites in the Jawlan/Golan Heights before 1967, calculated against official Syrian registers of villages and mazāriʿ, together with a selection of localities across northern Jordan and the Hauran.

This dataset constitutes the PRHP’s official gazetteer of documented localities. Version 2.0 contains 1,112 entries and provides PRHP gazetteer numbers, preferred English transliterations, Arabic and Hebrew forms, and sub-district or regional attributions. Preferred forms were established primarily from locally attested oral usage and checked, where possible, against historical maps, census records, administrative gazetteers, archival sources, and relevant scholarly literature. The selection of a preferred form does not imply that competing historical or dialectal forms are erroneous.

A locality is included principally when at least one narrator was born or resided there. For localities depopulated before 1948, inclusion may also derive from the birthplace or place of residence of one or both of a narrator’s parents. The more than 1,100 localities encompassed by the broader PRHP corpus include subsidiary sites discussed in interviews, such as khirab, ʿizab, and mazāriʿ, which are not necessarily catalogued as independent entries in this gazetteer.

This public release provides preferred toponymic forms and administrative or regional attributions established according to PRHP editorial conventions. Enquiries concerning scholarly collaboration may be directed to the project curator. Access to the materials is subject to project policy, participant consent, privacy considerations, and the nature of the proposed research.

The deposit comprises the structured XLSX dataset, a UTF-8 CSV preservation copy, a searchable PDF edition, and a README describing the contents, methodology, and conditions of use.