Nubian communities in Northeast Africa (Egypt and Sudan) suffered a series of devastating forced displacements between 1902 and 1964 as a consequence of dam construction across the Nile River. Concomitant to the destruction of Nubian lands and livelihoods was a program of archaeological work which represented Nubia as an ‘open air museum’ – a land of graves and ancient monuments. However, despite determinations made by state officials and archaeologists regarding the emptiness of Nubia, it was a vibrant, living landscape prior to dam construction. Utilizing ethnographic interviews as well as extensive archival research, this dissertation investigates how archaeological practice is implicated within processes of dispossession experienced by Nubian communities in Northeast Africa across the 20th Century. It does so by constructing a history of engagement between archaeologists and Nubia from 1885 to the present. From imperial archaeologists, embedded within military infrastructures of occupation, who exemplified Nubia as a model for social difference and racial hierarchy, to postcolonial archaeologists who sought to define the boundaries of Nubian indigeneity, forms of recognition, and sovereignty, archaeology has had an outweighed influence on the lives and fate of Nubian people. This dissertation examines three key themes involved in archaeological practice in Nubia: coloniality, wastelanding, and dispossession. It considers how archaeological practice is embedded within processes of economic, political, and territorial dispossession; historical and ongoing discursive and material production of Nubia as a ‘wasteland’; and how ongoing archaeological coloniality perpetuates forms of epistemic denial upon contemporary Nubian communities, even as Nubian archaeology moves towards a self-proclaimed process of decolonization. Ultimately, this dissertation concludes that archaeology remains an infrastructure of dispossession for Nubian communities in Northeast Africa.