City of Facades: Archaeology, History, and Urbanism in Velha Goa revisits early modern colonial urbanism 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 understanding of social processes, owing principally to the limits of the colonial archied themselves.