City of Facades

City of Façades: Archaeology, History, and Urbanism in Velha Goa revisits early modern colonial urbanisms through an archaeological project conducted in 2012 at the Portuguese colonial site of Velha Goa, India. Histories written about the city's growth and decline from 1510 to the current day are unavoidably structured by elite, top-down understandings of social processes, owing principally to the limits of the colonial archives themselves. As a result, quotidian material transformations, essential to urban processes, remain largely unconsidered. The archaeological data explored in this volume allows us to reflect on these transformations and how they shaped colonial life, both during and after Portuguese rule.