In the face of the 1948 war, upheaval, and the destruction of communal and family ties, Palestinians today maintain memories and maps that assign Palestinians geographical locations and origins, even when those places no longer exist in actuality. This paper will analyze how Palestinians post-1948 portray the physical spaces of their pre-1948 villages as maps of the past, maps which that guide people to recognize the physical landscape and the significance of the village to its inhabitants, and to create specific images and narratives of the village in the pre-48 period. In addition to cartographic representations, which we have come to understand as a two-dimensional symbolic representation of three-dimensional space, I will also discuss other forms of mapping in which physical locations are represented lists of place names, journey maps, poem maps, and stories. The physical recording of these memories is inscribed by and re-inscribes the projection of Palestinian history of what existed and was experienced pre-1948. My analysis draws on Pierre Nora’s work, what he terms “sites of memory” (lieux de memoire) which he suggests are where “memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects.” (Nora 1989: 7-9) Thus, Palestinian maps of the pre-1948 landscape can be understood to consist not only of place names, but also communal experiences, social values, idealizations, and specific views of the natural world. Since the majority of people who lived in these places have never returned to live or visit them since 1948, the photographs, maps, poems, and stories that they present allow us to understand their ways of seeing the past mediated through their production in the present.

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