One of the disadvantages of the modern mining health & safety imperative to keep your mine site clean is that we destroy evidence that might delight future archaeologists. Proper mine closure is even worse: we remove all the delightful artifacts that provide evidence of current life-styles.
Consider beer cans. They were first introduced around 1935 and have been left lying around ever since. A good archaeologist can tell lots about your prospective mine site if he/she finds an old beer can: the site is no valuable historic site for example, so you can proceed to excavate the big pit.
But beware if the archaeologist finds coprolites–a few are shown in the following photo. For if they find coprolites, maybe ancient civilizations inhabited the site and you better seek gold elsewhere.
The moral of this story is that maybe you should employ a good archaeologist before you set out to find gold. At which point I disclose that I was at a beer-drinking session the other night with archaeologists and we talked a lot of coprolites. In addition, I met one of my heroes: Brian Fagan. What an honor to meet the man most of whose books I own and have read. I particularly recommend Before California in which he writes at length about the archaeology of the Royal Mountain King Mine in Copperopolis, California.
