In Chapter 5, “Epistemological Formation of the Archaeological Site,” I demonstrate how a “wild landscape” at the fringes of the nation is first discovered as a site and then domesticated by the institutional apparatus of postcolonial governmentality into a materialized epistemic space—an excavation site—an ideologically framed spatial regime of inscription. This process is brought about through the application of what in ASI parlance is called the “Wheeler method”—a practice through which an untamed landscape is rationalized and brought within the encompassing grasp of Cartesian perspectivalism. Introduced in Indian archaeology by Sir Mortimer Wheeler—the ebullient military-archaeologist who revolutionized the practice of colonial archaeology in India as a scientific enterprise during his tenure as the director general of the ASI between 1944 and 1948—the Wheeler method systematically converted the undomesticated landscape into a scientific laboratory, whereby the generated data could be confined, controlled, and codified. In this archaeological laboratory, facts and artifacts about pasts could be accurately documented and scientifically retrieved by keeping a detailed three-dimensional record of the finds. I argue that this transformation of a wild landscape into an excavation site not only controlled the archaeological epistemology but also controlled the ontology of the very subjects who produced knowledge.