Leandro Matthews Cascon is a Brazilian archaeologist with twenty years of experience researching the Amazon forest, with a focus on the roles of plant use in the Amazonian past and present. Since 2018 he has dedicated himself to the study of Amazonian indigenous material culture in European museums, approaching ethnographic collections both as materialized indigenous knowledge of the deep and recent past, as well as sources on collecting practices and the colonial contexts in which these were undertaken.
His work aims to increase access of indigenous peoples to their ancestral collections, and he believes that approaches which help to empower native stakeholders are not only morally correct, but in fact produce better science. He is currently a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS/KNAW), under the NIAS – NIOD – KITLV Fellowship Moving objects, Mobilising Culture in the Context of (De)colonisation (2025-2026).