During the 19th century, archaeology emerged as a ‘scientific’ discipline with an increasing dependence on nascent technologies. Much archaeological fieldwork of this formative period took place in the Ottoman Middle East. Coinciding with a period of intense modernization in Ottoman lands, processes and epistemologies of archaeology became entangled with Ottoman modernization efforts. Many of the Ottoman modernization projects, especially the major infrastructural ones, were carried out with European involvement. European engineers, architects, and administrators flocked to the Ottoman Empire, in part, to help transform communication and transportation infrastructures. The resulting intensified and altered encounters with Ottoman lands fueled a growing interest in the ancient landscapes of the Middle East for a diverse group of European and Ottoman actors. In particular, two regions, rich in archaeological sites, were affected by modernization projects - western Anatolia with its early railroads and southern Mesopotamia with its steamboats and then its railways. Infrastructural modernization not only acted as a catalyst for new archaeological fieldwork, for example by making sites more accessible along railways, but the modernization of the region also directly impacted the way archaeology was practiced by a diversified group of actors. Tracing the development of archaeology as a scientific discipline within the context of a modernizing Ottoman Middle East helps us understand how science and technology have been put to work to study the past. While subjectivities, rooted in orientalism, colonialism and imperialism, affected the interpretation and reception of archaeological finds, the increasingly systematic and technologically dependent ways that the remnants of the past were explored both challenged and affirmed how people understood themselves and the world around them. Utilizing a range of sources, from archaeological reports and tourist guidebooks to correspondence generated by the expanding Ottoman bureaucracy, this presentation aims to situate the history of archaeological exploration in the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century within the complex dynamics of modernization and the concurrent transformations of technologies and the conceptual developments of science.