Archaeology is often considered one of the most visual of the sciences to emerge in the nineteenth century. Its dependence on description and illustration, the use of photography as a tool to support its practice, its centrality in museums and exhibitions, and the employment of its discoveries in popular entertainments, as well as in pictorial art, attest to the many cultures of visuality with which it inter-penetrated and inscribed mutual influence. Yet unlike other scientific disciplines its accumulation of knowledge did not rely upon technologies that extended visual capacity. In contrast to medicine and astronomy which needed microscopes to look at the very small and telescopes to look at the very large, archaeology could look deep into the past with the human eye alone. The most privileged of archaeologists was therefore the fieldworker, who could look with their own eyes at archaeological objects in situ as well as study them in the museum, university or other ‘centre of calculation’ as Bruno Latour has named these sites of knowledge presentation. Yet the embodied vision of the archaeological fieldworker – embodied not only within the organs of perception but also in the cultural milieu of the archaeological site – was far from simple. The fieldworker was caught up in a series of overlapping ways of seeing that drew influence (often unwonted and unnoticed) from the social, political and personal relations with which the archaeological site was necessarily involved.