In this talk, I present a new research project that aims to disentangle excavation histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, centuries in which scientific methods were rapidly in development in archeology and a time at which colonialism and foreign rulership of large parts of the Middle East were shifting hands and geopolitical turns impacted the way in which archeological fieldwork could be undertaken. While it is widely acknowledged that the Mandate period brought with it different possibilities and agendas for archeological missions, the shifts occurring between the Late Ottoman period, and the early Mandate periods and their impacts on the development of urban archeology have rarely been central to research, despite the fact that they would have impacted the impacted the evidence which is left for us to work with—also today.