A Lesson in Elemental Return: (Re)Building a Lime Kiln in Palestine

Carved into a stone terrace on the hills of Bethlehem, a lime kiln stands, smoke finding its way between the stones, blackening their surfaces. Moments after being fed a dense pile of thistles, the fire consumes them, its heat slowly transforming particles of limestone into lime. Looking through the kiln’s opening offers a glimpse into the fires of historical lime kilns across Palestine, abandoned or buried for over half a century, their flames extinguished through colonial practices of dispossession.

In Arabic, the word shid (شيد, lime) shares linguistic roots with the verb shayyada (شَيَّدَ, to construct firmly) capturing lime’s significance both as a binding agent and as a symbol of continuity. For centuries, lime bound stone walls, insulated wells, and surfaced floors, shaping the built environment of Palestine’s Central Mountains. Its durability is not immediate, it hardens over time through interaction with atmospheric carbon, eventually returning to limestone—its material origin—but in a renewed state, molded by human hands and bound to new surfaces.

According to researcher Rawda Ghanaim (2023), all lime kilns in Palestine, historically dotting the Central Mountains in their hundreds, had fallen to disuse by the late 1960s. With the rise of Portland cement, a quick-setting, mass-produced material emblematic of a neoliberal era, coupled with the Israeli occupation restricting Palestinians’ access to land, local lime production eventually ended.

Building on my research into material ecologies in Palestine—particularly with Al-Wah’at collective and architect Raghad Saqfalhait, examining how more-than-human materials shape and are shaped by land politics—I began studying lime during my residency at the Wonder Cabinet in Bethlehem in autumn 2024. This project started as an experiment: to construct a traditional lime kiln as a site of collective learning. But as I worked tirelessly with participants to keep the fire burning for three days, deeper questions emerged: how does labor serve as an act of reclamation—of land, material knowledge and communal values? How does reconnecting with past practices allow us to reimagine a future return to our stolen lands as part of a broader Palestinian struggle for liberation? Tracing lime’s journey of return to its origin—immersed in labor, collaboration, and material elements of earth, fire, water, and air—became a meditation on what it means to return; on how these historical practices can mend the present ruptures in our relationship with the land, fractured by settler colonialism.

Earth: Tracing Lime Kilns in the Hills of Palestine ///

In Qalandiya village, just 30 meters away from the separation wall, is a pit in a half circle filled with stones and rubble. “This is a latton (لتون)” says Abu Wael, an eighty-year old villager, pointing at the pit, its stone walls encrusted with a layer of hardened lime. Around it, the ground is covered with Sarcopoterium, natesh (نتش) in Arabic, a spiky shrub common in the Mediterranean region used historically as a fuel. “Only 100 meters away, Khallet Salman area once yielded hard stones used to produce lime; now inaccessible due to the separation wall,” Abu Wael elaborated.

Over the past few years, I have come across many lime kilns—known locally as latatin (لتاتين, plural of latton لتون) or kababir (كبابير, plural of kabbara كبارة)—often by accident during my walks across Palestine’s hills. I have encountered these structures within Area C of the West Bank and on sites of villages destroyed in the 1948 Nakba, some in Israeli-designated “national parks.” Once the heart of Palestine’s lime industry—dating back at least 3,000 years—these kilns have now been relegated to mere “archaeological” objects. Found in ruins, their most basic forms appear as pits three meters deep and four meters in diameter, dug into the bedrock of Palestine’s hills, surrounded by piles of stone—remnants of their once intricate structures.

Locating these kilns today requires not only a deep understanding of their historical placement logic but also navigating significant changes in the landscape since their last use at least five decades ago. Restrictions on mobility since the Oslo Accords, intensified since October 7, 2023—with increased military surveillance over rural outskirts and the genocidal approach of armed Israeli settlers—have further complicated this task. Lime kilns were typically built in small valleys near villages to facilitate transportation while being far enough to prevent smoke from affecting the residents. The abundant presence of natesh thistles and limestone in the surrounding land, as well as the prevailing wind patterns, were critical factors in choosing their locations. While this localized industry, once sustained by deep ecological knowledge and communal labor, has been systematically dismantled by settler-colonialism, remnants of these kilns act as material archives, holding the potential to reconnect with its lost practices.

Fire: An Experiment in Building and Firing a Lime Kiln ///

اشقــح وارمـي بالكبّـــــــــاش
Cut (the natesh) and throw it into the kubbash
(the pressed pile of natesh)

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طلــعـــت نـــاره فـــوق احجـــاره
The kiln’s fire has risen above its stones

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هـانــــا جــــوا لـحــم امـشــــــوّا
Here, inside, is roasted meat
(referring to the stones)

Verses sung by workers at the lime kilns, as documented by Omar Hamdan in Popular Architecture in Palestine (1996).

In his documentation of lime production, historian Omar Hamdan not only records detailed steps of lime kiln construction, but also the rituals surrounding it, from collecting fuel, songs, and communal meals. To secure enough fuel to fire the kiln, men and women gathered, cut and compressed thousands of natesh piles, abundant in the Palestinian hills known for their ability to rapidly reach high temperatures, months before the building and firing of the kiln.

These historical accounts, along with guidance from distinguished material scientist Dr Hamdallah Bearat, informed my lime kiln experiment—an embodied pedagogical experience of this lost practice. Determined to fire it before the rainy season, I began constructing the kiln in late October 2024 in collaboration with Abu Firas, a skilled stonemason from Dar Salah, Bethlehem. We designed a smaller version of the traditional kiln—one meter underground and half above—built from stone. Distancing its smoke from residential buildings, we built the kiln in the garden of the Wonder Cabinet in Al-Karkafeh, Bethlehem, hoping to make it an educational prototype for future cultural activities. Despite never having seen such kilns, Abu Firas demonstrated remarkable skill in constructing the kiln and made thoughtful adjustments based on the site’s landscape and his expertise in stonework. He taught me how to identify different stone types as we collected them from a nearby hill—hard mezze stones (مزي) for burning into lime and porous nari stones (ناري) for building the kiln, its name deriving from fire (nar نار), meaning fire in Arabic, reflecting its fire-resistance.

Preparing for a three-day firing (day and night)—the minimum duration recorded historically for transforming stones into lime—I gathered and piled natesh with volunteers for a week, but we fell short of the needed quantities. To compensate, we sourced sawdust from local carpenters and olive pulp from the recent harvest. The culmination was Hazr Days, a three-day event accompanying the kiln’s firing, including food, songs, and a walk to an old kiln in Battir, Bethlehem. The labor was grueling, and the fire consumed the fuel rapidly. Despite the collective efforts of over fifteen participants tending the flames in shifts, sustaining them continuously over three days was challenging. This repetitive, labor-intensive experience left us all reflecting deeply on the communal labor and the socio-economic infrastructure that historically fueled such practices. Its loss represents more than the disappearance of a technique; it is the erosion of reciprocal relationships—between people, land, and resources.

Water and Air: From Limestone to Lime and Back ///

قوّة الشّيد بترجع لأبوه
the strength of shid returns to its father

This saying, documented by Tawfiq Canaan in The Palestine Arab House (1933), holds a dual meaning: first, that lime strengthens with time, returning to its original form—limestone—and second, that its strength depends on the quality of the stone from which it originates.

A week after firing the kiln, I stood with Abu Firas and participants of Hazr Days—curious yet with tempered expectations—ready to open it. The kiln we built had an inner compartment for fuel, vaulted and topped with stones. The top layer was all black, indicating it was yet to decompose. Digging deeper in the kiln, we observed an outer layer of white material forming on the stones, thickening toward the fire compartment. However, none of the stones were fully decomposed; the core remained stone—perhaps symbolic of the difficulty in delving deep into these practices today, leaving us only able to scratch at the surface.

When I soaked the stones in water, lime washed off, leaving behind the undecomposed parts. As I processed and gathered the yield, I revisited historical building mixes incorporating lime including maddeh (مدة, flooring), kuh’l (كحل, filling), and qsarah (قصارة, plaster). By sampling lime from old buildings and experimenting with mixes that include fibers, ash, broken pottery, and industrial waste, I aim to examine contemporary uses for this ancient material. This process—where limestone sourced from the earth decomposes with fire, is shaped with water; and hardens over time with air to rejoin the stone from which it came—offered me a new understanding of return as a form of regeneration; not as a singular event, but an ongoing, iterative process, with its strength always tied to its source.

This experiment, though partial in its success, informs future attempts. From the material traces of old kilns, to Abu Firas’s intuitive skill in building something he had never seen, to our adaptations in sourcing alternative fuel when traditional methods proved unfeasible, the kiln became a site of collective reflection and negotiation. Rebuilding it after five decades of disuse is not a promise to revive a lost practice as much as it is an attempt to reconnect with its knowledge and relationships severed by colonial violence. Especially now, when human and more-than-human worlds are being systematically eradicated by a genocidal state, preserving and reimagining these practices sits within a history of collective efforts—by fighters, artists, farmers, and landowners—towards return. Return not with a capital “R”, envisioned as a singular event in the distant future, but an iterative process of connection and reconnection to traditions, values and practices that sustain the land; in a way, nurturing avenues for the land itself to return to its people. ■