This article explores the entanglement of archaeology and the antiquities trade in Egypt and Sudan during the antiquities rush of the British colonial period. I argue that the buying and selling of archaeological objects played a central role in the business of archaeology, which relied on the cyclical extraction and transfer of financial and archaeological capital. This cycle operated through distinct production stages of funding, acquisition, export, and distribution, each essential to sustaining the business. Archival evidence highlighted here demonstrates that archaeology in Egypt and Sudan was shaped by the economy of supply and demand, and the monetisation of archaeological objects. The article focuses on the roles and transactions of three excavator-suppliers who were involved in British-led excavations: Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, John Garstang and Charles Trick Currelly.

The nineteenth century was a pivotal time for archaeology which aimed to distance itself from its antiquarian roots through the establishment of national bodies, its own methodology and by striving for academic credibility. This was also the time when Britain experienced an explosion of print, with about 125,000 newspaper and periodical titles being published.1 In response, the review journal became a popular and pervasive genre. Although reviews have been used in single-author studies, they have received little attention outside of the literary fields. A recent issue of the Victorian Periodicals Review has, however, demonstrated the potential of reviews as a source for the history of other disciplines.2 This paper will focus on reviews of books on Romano-British archaeology published between 1840 and 1860 to show how they can illuminate the development of archaeology during this formative period. It will reveal that book reviews played a crucial role in shaping and maintaining the scholarly community, helping to determine membership, aims and objectives. Reviews also affected subject methodology, by promoting how to conduct research and disseminate findings. Reviewers found themselves in a powerful position, with a platform to reach and influence the general public and the ability to support or undermine authors and their projects.

This article takes its departure from the authors' ethnobiographical accounts of labour relations between local and foreign archaeologists collaborating on fieldwork projects in Türkiye, where native speakers undertake a double burden of becoming mediators in order to facilitate the professional, educational, and day-to-day activities of their foreign counterparts. While the need for interpreters is often an inevitable and legitimate aspect of fieldwork conducted outside one's own linguistic and cultural milieu, the ubiquitously informal reliance on native-speakers to take on interlocutors' tasks as favours or side-jobs conceals the extent of time, labour, and resources being extracted. This can interfere with the agency of local archaeologists as trained experts in their own right, pushing them to the periphery of professional research activity and reinforcing colonial notions of archaeological knowledge as the prerogative of Western 'experts' assisted by local 'facilitators'. Taking a historical view, the paper highlights the encounters between Western excavators and Theodore Macridy Bey, one the first Ottoman archaeologists. Macridy was able to pursue his archaeological ambitions within the constraints of his duties as representative of the Imperial Museum, while these duties also placed him at odds with his foreign counterparts. In his correspondences as well as field notes, Theodore Macridy makes frequent references to being subjected to an explicitly Orientalist gaze instead of being treated professional colleagues on equal footing. The analysis will also draw from Western accounts in which Macridy is regarded with mixed feelings.

This paper focuses on the intersection between archaeological labor and local communities' cultural heritage and social memory. More specifically, it examines how archaeological projects in Tres Zapotes and local people participation as workforce have shaped the perception of archaeological remains as well as the multiple narratives originated about them. The village of Tres Zapotes, located in the Gulf lowlands of southern Veracruz, constitutes the humble beginnings of the history of Olmec archaeology, as it was there where the very first Olmec monument was reported in 1869. This unprecedented monolith put Tres Zapotes on the map and changed the course of its sociocultural development. During the twentieth century, the village has experienced at least three major events in terms of archaeological labor: 1) in 1938 Matthew Stirling began the first systematic archaeological project at Tres Zapotes; 2) in 1975 an archaeological museum was founded in the village; and 3) in the 1990s Christopher Pool conducted a second major archaeological project at the site. These events have led to the emergence of at least four types of economy activities related to archaeology in Tres Zapotes: archaeological project workers, museum staff, tour guides, and craftspeople. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Tres Zapotes in 2022, I present life stories of individuals from each category to explore how engaging in archaeological labor contributes to the creation of local narratives about the ancient past, and to the reformulation of cultural identity.

From 1930 to 1939 the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology sponsored archaeological work at the ancient Maya site of Piedras Negras, Guatemala. American archaeologists contracted Indigenous workers with previous experience working in the chicle and mahogany industries. These workers provide an avenue for ‘epistemic disobedience’1 or privileging the experience of colonized peoples to see how they, as Indigenous archaeological workers, were uniting technologies, techniques, knowledge, and industries in ways that influenced the practice of archaeology. Viewing the site as a community of practice2 in which its products are extracted and interpreted through ‘braided knowledges’3 this paper explores Piedras Negras as a node of intellectual and industrial syncretism. We challenge extant scholarship about Piedras Negras that presents the research as the result of Western knowledge production, contending that site boundaries are fictive, and the epistemes of archaeological knowledge limited. Beyond them lies a thus far overlooked and more complete narrative about how archaeological knowledge is produced — and who produces it. Through archive research we argue that reading not just the results, but also how results were created, constructed, and braided with industries, machineries, and local knowledge offers windows into the intellectual groundwork of the project and re-writes the protagonists of data construction.