It's also important to point out that you will not be Indiana Jones. You will not be exploring ancient tombs and realistically, the chances of you getting on an excavation in a newly disovered city are nigh on impossible.

The archaeological method is a broad and deep field. What you end up doing could be participating in a field survey, which in its most basic form is walking over a sight and looking at what is on the ground.

If you are excavating, you will not be looking at an entire site but rather a small area of one, perhaps a gateway or a feature previously picked up from aerial photography. At the end of the day, excavations are both very expensive and very destructive, so no-one can afford to dig up an entire city over one season.

A lot of museums also conduct what they call community archaeology projects. These are typically summer projects where the excavation is done by volunteers under the guidance of professionals. If you're interested in coming up to Alaska for the summer -- you'd have to pay your own way -- I can put you in touch with a program that I like.

This is better suited for /r/archaeology than /r/AskHistorians.

However, I will say that you can certainly sign up for field schools where you can go and learn archaeological skills such as excavation and survey. For most field schools you need to pay to go on these projects, especially if you are an undergrad and not majoring in anthropology or a related field. There are scholarships and grants you can apply for to cover the cost of going, but these are few and far between.

It is absolutely possible to participate in an archaeological excavation without any prior experience. I have met and worked with literally hundreds of formerly inexperienced volunteers.

However, I must warn you, it's not quite as romantic as it seems. It's full of long, hard days of manual labor, staring at dirt. Most archaeological excavations are not on "undiscovered" cities, as they have to be discovered before you can excavate them. If you are working on a survey project looking for new sites, most of what you would be doing is walking around looking for pottery or artifacts on the ground, and mapping them to find a concentration, which would indicate the presence of a site. This thread on /r/archaeology has a bunch of descriptions of fieldwork to give you an idea of what it's actually like.

Even though it's hard work and long days, I absolutely love it. It is the highlight of the year for me, even when I am dodging rockets from Hamas or sweating so hard in the 115 degree sun that it is literally dripping off me. Totally worth it to see things unseen for millennia and figure out the puzzle of what they meant.

If you are still interested, all you need to do is decide where in the world you want to dig. I work in Israel primarily, and there are a lot of field schools dedicated to teaching people with no prior experience how to properly perform an excavation. But there are field school all over the world, in many different situations. If you are interested in participating in an excavation in your area of the world, talk to your anthropology/archaeology department at your university. If you don't have one, contact some other local colleges or universities' anthropology departments, and ask them about participation.

Please note, that most of these opportunities will have a monetary cost associated with them. The cost for the dig I participate in is about $3300 plus airfare for a 6 week excavation for volunteers, and half that for a three-week experience. If you are interested in receiving school credit for the experience, that will cost extra, depending on the program. For a dig in Israel, expect a price of around $1500 for a three-week half season experience, not counting airfare.

Here is a link to the dig that I work at, it is a field school for several universities in the United States, including Harvard.

If you let us know what area of the world you are interested in, we can point you along on some next steps.

As I've discussed with my archeology-friend, the best way to be on a dream-excavation, is to get filthy rich and pay your own expedition!