Working for free with paying a membership was like taking classes (no credits of course) but they didn't charge $200 a semister hour!

Hands on experience, loads of good people willing to teach, special events and topical classes, and of course the most interesting part of archaeology... sitting for hours and cataloging.

It's been years, but there was a local guy who had a way of taking the layers and artifacts from a dig and putting them into a graphic display. That was back in 486 days, so I'm sure it's common software now.

One of my projects was making reproductions (oh no!) of spearpoints. Actually we used epoxy and cast molds from the originals, so classrooms could have replicas that were not worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. The idea was to sell sets to educators and use the profits to help fund the rescue group.

I always manage to have some sort of volunteer work in my life.