This paper proposes an landscape’s archaeology of Rio Grande (Rio Grande do Sul), in the period 1870 to 1910. It takes photographs as a source of access to material culture. Understanding that the city went through three distinct stages: military, commercial and industrial, here is treated the transition from the second to the third stage. In this paper, we applied concepts of landscape’s archaeology and we considered the informative aspects (as recording technique) and subjective expression of photography. It counts with supporting papers and reports of that time, and the analysis of 12 photographs, to perceive the transitions - changes social, economic, political and symbolic - materialized in city landscapes. In this way, we believe that the information intersection provides the perception of the elements that have changed.