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.

By unravelling the biases about the existing descriptions of Goa and its hinterland, analyses of the archaeological data argue that the dominant historical narratives characterizing it as the ‘Rome of the East’ substantiate a vision of the city that erases other social groups and cultures. Historical tropes of ruination in the description of Goa from the seventeenth century onwards mask the rich and varied archaeological evidence of enduring forms of urbanisms. This book, while questioning overarching narratives of urban decline, allows for a characterization of the concealed failures of colonial urban governance and its legacies in perpetuating ideal urban forms that still influence both heritage management and urban planning in Goa today.