Archeologists are like detectives of the past, unearthing clues about past events. Archeology is the reconstruction of past cultures through their material remains and the study of how cultures change over time.
Artifacts are objects that people create or modify.
For the Dean Street site, thousands of different types of artifacts representing several different time periods will be uncovered. Features can be thought of as buildings, stains in the ground from a campfire, or the remnants of an old tree. Each artifact and feature location identified during the archeological study will be carefully recorded so that the reconstruction of the Dean Street site is as accurate as possible. Before archeologists excavate a site they study maps and documents from the pre-Colonial era to the present. In the case of Dean Street, we examined records, maps, and diaries of people living in Albany from the early 1600s to the 1880s.