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With the hot afternoon Spanish sun beating down on my back, I drew my trowel through a few centimetres of rocky soil and saw a piece of dark brown clay embedded in the surface I had just cleared.

I carefully dusted it off and gently pried it from its soil matrix with a smile. Iron Age pottery, again! I put it in the “finds” tray in the appropriate quadrant and took a break to stretch my legs, looking down from the over-2,500-year-old Galician hill fort out to sea, the blue waves of the Atlantic rolling into shore upon the rocky coastline below.

Over four weeks, our team of volunteers dug and scraped away the rocky soil at A Cabecina — literally meaning “small hill” in Galicia’s language of Galego. It is one of many peaks topped with an Iron Age hill fort along this most northern stretch of the Iberian Peninsula’s Atlantic coast.

We were looking for walls of roundhouses that formed the main part of the hill fort structure, used for defence and habitation in the centuries before Roman armies invaded Iberia and claimed the territory between the Douro and Minho rivers as theirs in 137 BC. The tools and utensils left behind were also our targets, forged from bronze or iron or shaped from clay and used in the daily lives of Galicians millennia ago.

Our days of hoeing, shovelling and trowelling in search of stone walls and clay crockery were part of an effort in one of Galicia’s coastal communities to dig into the area’s past and preserve it for years to come.

The local forestry co-operative-funded project is one of a large number of volunteer-based archeological projects in Europe that are giving interested travellers and students the chance to experience the workings of a real-life archeological dig.

The Oia forestry co-operative, supported in part by local and national heritage organizations, put forth the funds for the archeological excavation of several sites under its domain, and I and about a dozen other volunteers, under the direction of a dig director, were lucky enough to be chosen to work at one of the main sites in August.

The participants ranged in age (from young university students to retired people in their 60s) and experience (from people like myself with no experience to trained archeologists). A mix of languages spoken, with Spanish the first language of about half the participants and English the first language of the other half, added to the diversity of the group.

During the four-week project, we were housed (at a family-run guest house near the dig site) and fed three locally sourced meals a day (often featuring caught-that-morning fish and seafood). We worked on the dig from Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., and then headed back to the guest house for showers to wash off the dirt before a mid-afternoon lengthy Spanish lunch.

Evenings and weekends were generally free to enjoy with the other members of the dig group, but many activities for the volunteers were organized by the project manager of the dig, including weekly archeology-themed talks given at local bars, and excursions to spots of interest in the area. The outings included a tour of a 12th-century monastery, a visit to a hotel’s hydrotherapy spa, an afternoon at the reconstructed Iron Age city of Santa Trega, and a day trip to the beautiful Cies Islands.

We even attended a horse corral, an annual event held in many regions in Galicia, where hundreds of semi-wild horses are brought down out of the surrounding hills for health treatments, branding and grooming.

If reading about all this makes you want to sign up for a volunteer-based archeological dig tomorrow, I can see why, but I don’t want to sugar-coat the experience. Even though we generally only worked 25 hours each week, the truth is those were 25 hours of quite hard work.

“They don’t call it a dig for nothing,” I liked to joke to my fellow volunteers whenever I got the chance.

We started clearing brush at ground level in our two trenches at the beginning of the month and then dug our way through the granitic soil, with wind that often blew at least half as much as we had just dug back into our trenches and onto our faces. We used shovels and hoes to remove the dirt, dumping it into wheelbarrows that were trundled over to the “spoil heap” and then back to be refilled, the process repeated countless times each day.

One of my fellow volunteers, a trained archeologist who now works in heritage preservation, often comes on digs just for fun and to keep up her archeological skills. She joined our group for the last two weeks of the A Cabecina project and commented to me one day that she has learned to always join a dig partway through.

With my back and arms starting to ache and my face covered in dirt after another tough day on the dig site, a state I had reached almost every day for the two weeks previous, I understood why. We were just then getting to the “archeology layers,” where the finds were more abundant and the work involved more trowelling into a bucket than shovelling into a wheelbarrow.

The next two weeks did indeed prove more fruitful and fun than the previous two, and although we didn’t make any earth-shaking discoveries, when we put our tools down for the last time on the final day of the dig, we had found enough to make ourselves and our dig director happy, including a lot of Iron Age pottery, a ceramic coin (probably used as a game piece), an archer’s arm guard, a piece of bronze and some walls of the hill fort structure. We had also expanded the excavated area and made targets for subsequent years clearer.

It was hard work, but the daily rewards on- and off-site made it all worthwhile.

Observing the dig site at the end of each day and seeing the progress made, enjoying the beautiful views from the site and the guest house, exploring the area and its history with my fellow volunteers, and knowing that each piece of pottery I found, no matter how small, was being seen for the first time in thousands of years by my very own eyes — these were singular experiences that were worth every challenging moment, and as we headed back to the guest house from the site for the last time, I knew that I would go on another archeology dig in a heartbeat.

Catherine Muir travelled to northwestern Spain last summer to take part in an archeological dig and discovered the joys (and demands) of volunteer archeology.

IF YOU GO

There are a wealth of archeological volunteer opportunities out there for interested travellers, even those without any archeological experience. If you’re lucky, you’ll happen upon an organization that is able to offer the experience for free (as an exchange of work for room and board) or for a minimal fee, but most charge an amount that at least partially covers housing, food and other expenses for the duration of one’s stay.

If you would like to participate in an overseas archeological dig yourself, check out the websites of the following organizations:

Costa dos Castros is an organization of forestry co-operatives in the region of Oia, Galicia, Spain, working to assist Oia’s economy through the managing and promotion of the region’s archeological sites.

http://costadoscastros.com/en_GB.

Past Horizons offers hundreds of listings for archeological projects around the world in a database offering detailed information about each site and project.

www.pasthorizons.com/worldprojects.

The Council for British Archaeology is a United Kingdom-based educational charity promoting archeology for everyone. The website lists some U.K.-based archeological projects and offers a range of online archeology resources and databases.

archaeologyuk.org/cba-volunteering.

The National Trust is a conservation and historical preservation organization for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, offering affordable one- or two-week working holidays in historic property and landscape preservation and archeology.

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/working-holidays.

The National Trust for Scotland offers similar types of working holidays at its properties throughout Scotland.

http://www.nts.org.uk/thistlecamps/.

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