Deadwood Chinatown Excavations

In the early summer of 2001, workers demolishing an old building for a new parking lot in Deadwood uncovered the remains of a part of the old Chinatown district. The city stepped in and asked the Archaeological Research Center to undertake the excavations to save the site as part of Deadwood's historic preservation efforts. A crew from the Center, led by archaeologists Rose Estep Fosha and Dan Byrne, conducted an excavation at the site which ran into September. They followed up with excavations in 2002 and 2003.

What they discovered at the site was an astonishing glimpse into the daily life of some of Deadwood's most colorful and least understood early residents. Below the remains of the 1950s-era Chicken Louie restaurant building they uncovered traces of boarding houses and other structures dating back into the 1880s Chinese occupation on Lower Main Street.

Thousands of artifacts were unearthed, ranging from dishes, bottles, toiletries and other implements of day-to-day life to a multitude of whiskey bottles and opium-smoking paraphernalia.