In this paper, I examine Saudi Arabia’s cultural and urban redevelopment projects through a genealogical reading of the material politics that have been central to Saudi petro-modernity. Specifically, I focus on the production of archives, museums, and commemorative space, sites that are rarely folded into discussions of the state despite their centrality. While we typically think of infrastructure as invisible, my discussion of material politics centers on cultural artifacts and built environments as evidentiary networks through which official historical knowledge moves and becomes visible. Through this approach, I am able to show how the commemoration of disciplinary history in everyday life and the attendant spatial politics are deployed to at once reproduce the power of the regime while creating new opportunities for petro-capital accumulation. I argue that projects of historical memorialization and urban planning are material realizations of the regime’s late-twentieth century strategies for political legitimation and economic diversification. From the mundane lifeworlds of archival documents and the spaces that house them to the spectacular commercial and archeological megaprojects, these simultaneously constitute monuments to oil modernity and are pillars of political governance. Yet, beyond presenting oil as a sign of God’s blessing on Al Saud’s divine rule, the historical record that animates these projects ignores the history of oil and its impact on everyday life. Indeed, the elision of oil, the key animating force for Saudi infrastructural development, is striking. Why is oil, so pervasive in our imaginations of Arabia, so absent in the discourses of the new cultural and urban projects? How can we think through the ways in which producers of knowledge have actively relegated oil to matters of exploration, production, and wealth, as a platform for us to understand how the political economy of oil has co-constituted political, economic, cultural, and social life in Arabia and beyond? I pursue such questions by attending to the ways in which the imperatives of the oil economy came to structure the production of Saudi Arabian material history, social relations, built environment, and concepts of modernity. Based on three years of ethnographic, archival, and oral history research in Saudi Arabia, I highlight everyday practices of state making and reveal how oil money is conceptualized not only as the “life-blood” of the Saudi economic sector, but of cultural national identity as well. In so doing, I also suggest new sites and modes for reading the Saudi state as an unfinished, unstable, work-in-progress.