I volunteered on a dig once in northwestern PA. No gold, but nobody expected to find any given the local history and prehistory.
The dig took place on national forest land in cooperation with the Archeology Institute of Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA. At the time, the director of the Institute was Dr. James Adovasio, the archeologist who had excavated the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter near Pittsburgh, where human occupation dates went back 14,000 years and farther, upending Clovis dates for the first humans in North America.
The excavation was mandatory field experience for Mercyhurst archeology students. The forest service and Mercyhurst allowed volunteers from the general public to join them.
Nothing significant was found on that dig
A few years earlier, they had uncovered artifacts from an extinct Iroquoian tribe, the Eriez, who had been defeated and dispersed by the Seneca in the early 1600s. At deeper levels, they also found some artifacts of the ancient Hopewell Culture going back almost 2000 years.
But, although nothing like that was found at the dig that I volunteered for, the experience was a chance for me to see how a dig gets set up and worked. I met other volunteers, like a mother and daughter who had volunteered at the huge Cahokia site in Illinois. While we waited for the students to get set up, a forest ranger took the volunteers on a tour of the area to show us trees planted on waterways by Native Americans to prevent erosion of the banks and keep the waterways open as "highways" for travel.
I also had the chance to meet with some archeology faculty and staff and discuss alternate theories of when and how the first people arrived in North America since the Clovis theory was being challenged by other sites besides Meadowcroft.
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