Political interests have often motivated archaeology in the Middle East. Yet its history has hitherto failed to help us understand how today’s display of Middle Eastern archaeological finds in some of the most famous museum collections in Europe is the result of a complex transfer in which objects and cultures moved from one canonical space to another, not without facing semantic difficulties. This paper investigates the role of archaeological finds between the excavation site in ancient Mesopotamia and attempts to shift and incorporate them into European canonical traditions, namely the museum collections of Britain, France and Prussia in the 19th century. Research on the excavations and their museological reception in Europe has mostly drawn a picture of a well-organised, purposive and logical enterprise in which finding and excavating objects had a clear purpose. Little attention has been paid to the fact, that the excavated items were initially objects without a clear status, even once they arrived in Europe. In exploring the circulation of cultural values and floating meanings of these objects, this paper scrutinize teleological approaches to the topic and sheds light on a shady and undefined time period between two apparently stable components in the historiography of these expeditions. By challenging narratives, which retrospectively deny the uncertainty involved in these events, the paper is an intervention of the current link between modernity, science and archaeology that has long dominated the history of archaeology in the Middle East. Such an approach takes also into account that knowledge in archaeology and heritage was intertwined with complex networks that entailed local resistance towards the European forces. The European narrative has long ignored the variety of approaches, technologies and practices towards preservation by local institutions and people, that is, non-elite, local and indigenous engagements with the material past. These vernacular discourses, e.g. practices of reworking and recontextualizing the material past, cut through chronological succession and linear time. Scholars have therefore increasingly pointed out that talking of archaeology (in the singular) as a unified practice imposes a universalist and hegemonistic discourse upon it that always links archaeology to progress and modernity. In contrast, a history of science “from below” takes into account not only scientific, institutionalized and professionalized knowledge and therefore challenges the colonial underpinnings of the foundation of archaeology as an institutionalized science, a field which in itself was by no means a stable entity as this paper will show.