Some archaeologists yearn to travel to exotic excavation sites in Africa or South America. But City College anthropologist Diana diZerega Wall prefers to go digging in her own backyard.

From 17th-century taverns to 18th-century wharves, Ms. Wall’s research has spanned New York’s Dutch, Colonial, and more recent past. One of her ongoing projects has been at the site of Seneca Village. The African-American and Irish immigrant community was located in present-day Central Park, between West 81st and 86th streets. She is using census records, tax records, ground-penetrating radar – a form of “noninvasive technology” – to search for archaeological traces of those early New Yorkers. This fall she has begun “soil borings” in an effort to find pottery and other evidence.

Ms. Wall’s research focuses on the city’s past, but she’s equally interested in sharing her knowledge with today’s New Yorkers. With Anne-Marie Cantwell, Ms. Wall has co-authored “Touring Gotham’s Archaeological Past: 8 Self-Guided Walking Tours through New York City”(Yale), a book slender enough to fit in the hip pocket or knapsack of any urban adventurer who wants to play time-traveler. She and Ms. Cantwell previously collaborated on a book about New York’s archaeological past called “Unearthing Gotham.”

Scores of guidebooks abound for helping one get around the Manhattan of the Time Warner Center or the new Museum of Modern Art – but how many explore its early history in depth? Each of Ms. Wall’s tours is organized geographically and thematically. For example, a New York harbor tour is structured around a ferry ride to Ellis Island. As the tour passes Governor’s Island, one learns about archaeological research on Dutch windmills. Using the book, one can stroll the Bronx’s shore and experience a “Voyage through Thousands of Years of Indian Life along the City’s Coast” or explore Brooklyn, once the third largest city in America.

Ms. Wall said that a tour of Inwood and Washington Heights is her favorite, because there one can see evidence of three distinct periods in the city’s history, all in the same neighborhood. In northern Manhattan, archaeologists have uncovered artifacts created by American Indians as well as those dating from Colonial times and the Revolutionary War. About 100 years ago, dedicated amateur archaeologists – sometimes dressed in shirtsleeves and ties – dug holes in search of artifacts there, but by the 1970s, they gave way to professionals conducting academic digs.

Following upon historical-preservation laws, environmental legislation passed on a national level began to be applied to New York at that time. Ms. Wall and others worked on a now-famous test case at the site of Broad and Pearl streets. If archaeologists could find any remnants of Dutch New York, developers would be required to hire archaeologists as part of their environmental impact studies (though only when needing governmental funds, a zoning variance, or other special city permits).

If Ms. Wall and her team had not found evidence of that archaeological past, it would have been “bad for urban archaeology,” she said. But they unearthed a tavern built by the second English governor of New York, and “public archaeology” began to flourish in New York.

Ms. Wall brings a lifetime of knowledge of the city to her work. She grew up in Yorkville and vividly remembers the Hungarian refugees who came to the area in 1956 after an uprising in their homeland. Her mother, Kay Thomas, worked as a fashion editor at the original New York Sun in the late 1930s and early ’40s.

Ms. Wall attended Nightingale-Bamford and then earned a B.A. at City College in anthropology. One reason she chose anthropology is that she was interested in everything to do with people: Since anthropology is the study of people, she felt, “you’re not really limiting yourself.”

While working toward her master’s and Ph.D. at New York University, she studied with anthropologist Howard Winters. His field of study was American Indians who lived in the Midwest between roughly 400 B.C. to 400 A.D. Research conducted in southern Illinois investigated how Native Americans learned to move from resource to resource.

Ms. Wall’s doctoral dissertation became the basis for her first book, “The Archaeology of Gender” (Plenum, 1994), which examined the changing nature of women’s roles in early America. She took a close look at household material objects, such as the china that women used to set their tables, from 1780s to 1830s. Ms. Wall’s research found that the meaning of meals changed, as did ideas of delicacy and gentility. Over time, people became more removed from food, she said, and women spent more money on dishes and silverware.

She went on to work at the South Street Seaport Museum as curator of archaeology in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Ms. Wall currently teaches in the anthropology department at City College, along with colleagues whose other specialties include medical anthropology and systems of healing, sometimes called alternative medicine. “But,” Ms. Wall explained, “If it’s your own medicine, it’s not alternative.”

Her husband is a jazz musician, and her son, Alexis Rockman, is a painter.

She hopes her new “walking tour” book will interest tourists, native New Yorkers who want to know more about their city, as well as avocational archaeologists. In short, the book will be of interest to anyone who asks, “Well, where can we go and see something?”