This paper examines the intersections of modern and ancient infrastructures amidst the creation of the eastern border between Syria and Turkey. The Ankara Accord of 1921 between France and the Ottoman Empire used infrastructural arteries to divide a region littered with ruins of previous empires. From Çobanbey to Nusaybin, the Baghdad Railway stood as the border between the two countries. East of Nusaybin, the line would be "the Old Road" to Cizre on the TIgris. When it came to the Old Road, however, the French and Turkish governments disagreed about how to define “old.” The French cited the most authoritative German archaeologists they could find to support their argument that the road used in Roman times was to the north; the Turks, for their part, appear to have encouraged peasants in the region to plant their fields in such a way as to cover the alleged Old Road to bolster an argument for a border further to the south. As humans on both sides of the border argued about Roman road bricks and fields of wheat, locusts made use of ancient infrastructure in a decidedly different way. As cultivation expanded in the fertile regions south of the Taurus Mountains along the border, invasions of the Moroccan locust continued. For laying eggs, the insects preferred clay outcrops above the rapidly expanding lands of wheat and cotton; these outcrops were not natural geological formations, however, but rather the remnants of Assyrian and Hittite settlements. In other words, the locusts used for their own propagation the very same physical structures whose attestation to past glory had attracted profit-seeking capitalists and power-hungry imperialists in the first place. Relying on French and Turkish government as well as local Kurdish sources, this paper explores the technical arguments marshaled in the process of creating a border between Turkey and Syria while also questioning the divide between nature and culture in the first place through an exploration of the tangled webs of agency involved in these infrastructural networks. In the process, the paper brings the approaches of Science and Technology Studies as well as Environmental History to the construction of the map of the modern Middle East.