Abstract
This article takes its departure from the authors’ ethnobiographical accounts of labour relations between local and foreign archaeologists collaborating on fieldwork projects in Türkiye, where native speakers undertake a double burden of becoming mediators in order to facilitate the professional, educational, and day-to-day activities of their foreign counterparts. While the need for interpreters is often an inevitable and legitimate aspect of fieldwork conducted outside one’s own linguistic and cultural milieu, the ubiquitously informal reliance on native-speakers to take on interlocutors’ tasks as favours or side-jobs conceals the extent of time, labour, and resources being extracted. This can interfere with the agency of local archaeologists as trained experts in their own right, pushing them to the periphery of professional research activity and reinforcing colonial notions of archaeological knowledge as the prerogative of Western ‘experts’ assisted by local ‘facilitators’. Taking a historical view, the paper highlights the encounters between Western excavators and Theodore Macridy Bey, one the first Ottoman archaeologists. Macridy was able to pursue his archaeological ambitions within the constraints of his duties as representative of the Imperial Museum, while these duties also placed him at odds with his foreign counterparts. In his correspondences as well as field notes, Theodore Macridy makes frequent references to being subjected to an explicitly Orientalist gaze instead of being treated professional colleagues on equal footing. The analysis will also draw from Western accounts in which Macridy is regarded with mixed feelings.