A street scene from Astoria’s Chinatown, which extended roughly between 5th and 9th streets.

As a historical archaeologist working with the Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project, Chelsea Rose shares in an effort to elevate stories of the state’s early Chinese residents.

Over the past eight years, the project has studied several archaeological sites in southern and Eastern Oregon that offer clues to those stories, such as mining and railroad camps. In a Thursday lecture at the Astoria Library, Rose will detail discoveries the project has made while offering a platform for Astorians to contribute stories of their own.

Chinese immigrants have played a significant role in Astoria’s history and development.

By 1881, more than 3,000 called the mouth of the Columbia River home, including many who worked in the river’s salmon canneries. A Chinatown district in Astoria continued for several blocks along Astor and Bond streets, lined with mercantiles and boardinghouses.

That changed with shifts in labor and discriminatory policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first federal law to deny entrance to the U.S. based strictly on ethnicity. Residents also faced discrimination on a local level, including from Tri-Weekly Astorian publisher Clinton DeWitt Ireland.

Much of Astoria’s Chinatown was demolished in the 1940s with the widening and rerouting of Marine Drive.

But the influence of its residents endures. The Garden of Surging Waves, a city park on the corner of 11th and Duane streets, tells of their contributions to train lines, roads and river jetties.

Those are the sorts of stories the statewide project is interested in telling.

Rose, whose work focuses on the settlement and development of the American West, is the director of Southern Oregon University’s Laboratory of Anthropology. Her recent book, “Chinese Diaspora Archaeology in North America,” is available from the University Press of Florida.