600 California Street Site is the oldest and most extensive Chinese site found in the United States and is the only major archaeological site ever found in San Francisco's Chinatown. Because few older buildings are ever demolished and few new structures are ever built within historic Chinatown most archaeologically significant sites remain undiscovered.

The hundreds of thousands of artifacts recovered at 600 California Street provide an archaeological perspective on the experiences and substantial contributions of Chinese immigrants to the social, economic and cultural development of the Western United States during the second half of the 19th century.