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The history of archaeology remains an overwhelmingly European narrative reflecting an idealized picture of the accomplishments of the Western heroes and their groundbreaking discoveries. Despite recent attempts to develop new concepts and methodologies to challenge the traditional boundaries of the field, a critical reassessment is still missing of the alternative discourses involved in early archaeological practice particularly in the non-Western world. The present talk addresses this gap by focusing on the lesser explored case of the Ottoman Empire and its fairly delayed involvement in archaeology in the nineteenth century. The talk examines the ways and means archaeology was practiced as a transnational discipline in the late Ottoman Empire by a diverse team of archaeologists affiliated with the Ottoman Imperial Museum (Müze-i Hümâyûn). In doing so, it aims to explore the entangled histories surrounding Ottoman archaeology at the turn of the century while reconsidering the binaries that have been central to the Eurocentric and nationalist narratives dominating the historiography up to present.