Chapter 3, “Bureaucratic Hierarchy in the ASI,” is a critical examination of the organizational hierarchy of the ASI, and the impact of its authoritarian structure on the lives of archaeologists who spend their entire careers working for this organization. Assistant archaeologists, superintending archaeologists, and director generals, along with archaeological laborers, are some key characters of this chapter. Their professional careers, lives in the field and in the office, relationship with their colleagues— subordinates and superiors—their ambitions, scholarly and professionally, and their frustrations are evocatively employed to describe the domineering authority of postcolonial bureaucracy. I show how the bureaucratic hierarchy of the state shapes the professional subjectivity of archaeologists and produces disenchanted archaeologists, despondently struggling with the task of creating knowledge. This chapter reveals the social and cultural world of bureaucratic archaeologists and argues that the institutional apparatus of the postcolonial state does not differentiate between the subjects it employs and the subjects it governs. The oppressive impact of its institution was pervasive, and its influence was exerted on all the members that constituted its structural apparatus.