When construction workers peel back the pavement in lower Manhattan, it’s like opening a skylight into the old New York — a place where water flowed through hollowed-out logs and the streets were crowded with ship builders, pottery makers, and tavern riffraff.

More than 3,000 objects have been found under Beekman Street between Pearl and Water streets, where archaeologist Alyssa Loorya has been monitoring a city construction site for the last two years.

The largest find was four pieces of the city’s old wooden water mains. These mains are hollowedout yellow pine logs, which distributed water from a water reservoir just north of Chambers Street during the end of the 18th and early 19th centuries, a historian and author of “Water for Gotham,” Gerard Koeppel, said.

The pieces are wider on one end and narrower on the other so that each section could fit into another, with a metal collar binding them together. Customers of the Manhattan Company, which eventually became the J.P. Morgan Chase Manhattan Bank, paid $5 a year per household with no more than five fireplaces to tap into the water mains. Another $1.25 was added onto the bill for each successive fireplace as a way to account for bigger households, Mr. Koeppel said.

One buried storeroom several feet below street level contained more than 2,000 objects, Ms. Loorya said. The remnants suggest a tavern once raged above in the early 19th century. Stemware from broken glasses, plates – including one that commemorated the death of George Washington — and food remains were found. There are skeletal remains of turkey, guinea fowl, leg of lamb, lobster, sheep, goat, and a lot of oysters. The absence of cow and pig remains, which were a staple throughout the area, is one aspect of the site that Ms. Loorya said she wanted to investigate.

A pocket of fossilized Caribbean coral called “stag horn” was also discovered. The coral looks like polished stones, and was often used as ballast in ships traveling the trade routes, Ms. Loorya said.

Before the 19th century, the area where the construction workers are now replacing fiber optic cables and repairing other municipal infrastructure was water. Early in the city’s history modern-day Pearl Street — then known as Queen Street — was Manhattan’s edge, but over time landfills created another three blocks. The South Street Seaport was the primary port for the city, so many of the buildings in the area catered to the shipping industry.

The old water mains that were found would have been buried by the Manhattan Company just a few feet below the cobbled or packed dirt streets. The system was notoriously leaky and unreliable, Mr. Koeppel said, citing letters to the editor in old newspapers complaining about the water service. The roots of the Lombardi poplar trees planted by the city starting in 1800 had a tendency to block up the mains, prompting a flurry of letters back and forth between Manhattan Company managers and municipal authorities, Mr. Koeppel said.

A pair of similar 13-foot wooden pipes was found at Coenties Slip Park in 2004, and last year workers at a Metropolitan Transportation Authority site at Battery Park discovered a 45-foot section of a wall that archaeologists believe dates back to the original Colonial settlement at the tip of Manhattan.

The construction workers at Beekman Street, who are supervised by an engineer from the Department of Design and Construction, Krishna Manikarnika, have to excavate everything by hand because of the archaeological remains. Their work is expected to finish up next spring. At about the same time, Ms. Loorya, a contractor for the city, will begin analyzing the artifacts in greater detail.

Ms. Loorya and the construction workers have also found a series of barrel vaults, a bone syringe, a decorative mother of pearl inlaid, and pieces of a kiln.

Every find brings a cautious sense that something new or unheard-of might be uncovered, she said.

“Of course, it’s always exciting when you find something, but you have to hold back and see if what you have is important,” she said.

A life-long New Yorker from Marine Park in Brooklyn, Ms. Loorya is also finishing up a dissertation at Brooklyn College on City Hall Park, where a renovation project in 1999 led to the discovery of 250,000 archaeological remains. The cache included “a lot of alcohol bottles,” which were likely drunk by the British soldiers who had their barracks there.