Austen Henry Layard in Nimrud. Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings. Indiana Jones in Cairo. The haunted sites of archaeology, the dreams of glory, the derring do and the digging—this is the stuff of Saturday matinees. But the excavation of treasure in foreign lands is also a fraught subject, never more so than today. Social, political, and economic agendas grind away beneath the beauty of the objects and the thrill of the find. In a series of three lectures, available for streaming—the third lecture, “Engineering Internationalism: Colonialism, the Cold War, and UNESCO’s Victory in Nubia,” is on December 7—the scholar Lynn Meskell takes on the international dynamics at play when it comes to historic discoveries. Meskell is a professor of both Anthropology and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennyslvania. —L.J.