How has science circulated around the Middle East since the Second World War? What practices have aided or hindered the circulation of scientific forms of knowledge, and how have these practices intersected with other processes? To answer these questions, this paper discusses the discipline of archaeology, drawing on a (micro-historical) example of archaeological fieldwork that took place in Egypt during the mid-1950s. The paper uses this example to illustrate why discussing such questions means thinking not only in terms of complex transnational networks of people and material, but also of the ways that these networks might promote and disrupt scientific (and other sorts of) action in the field. Just south of Cairo at the site of Mit Rahina, the Egyptian Department of Antiquities and the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania spent 1955 and 1956 conducting joint excavations. In the context of the early Cold War, the project had been initiated by the American side as an attempt to develop influence in (and gain artifacts from) post-Free Officers’ coup Egypt. The Museum promoted the work in terms of the sort of Free Worldist development programs that the United States government had started to advance around the world, hoping to use developmentalist rhetoric to their advantage as Egypt itself promoted modernization. Meanwhile, flexing their authority, officials from the Egyptian Department of Antiquities agreed to provide trainees whom the Museum’s staff could tutor in field techniques appropriate to the sort of Cold War modernity that politicians in the United States wished to promote. But how did this scheme pan out? Events in the field were much less straightforward than planned. Not only the trainees at Mit Rahina, but also the (messy and waterlogged) material qualities of the site itself made the field expertise of the archaeologists in charge there look deeply questionable. Moreover, these unexpected sources of agency also called into question the authority of the Egyptian officials who, after many years of French control, had finally taken charge of Egypt’s Department of Antiquities. In the archaeological field, people and material got in the way not only of the spread of scientific practices, but also of connected attempts to spread new political norms, ultimately constituting these practices and these norms in a far less clear-cut way than might otherwise have been the case. Within a changing post-war world, the circulation of science was a complex matter.