Secondary skills at maximum skill

tool cast for Skills to Pay the Bills

Archeology - Secondary Skills

Using this ability while at a digsite sets up a telescope on a tripod with a pole with a light on top of it to the right of it. The telescope points in the direction of the fragment and the light changes from red to yellow to green depending on how close you are to the fragment. While yellow and green are fairly accurate, the direction that the telescope is pointing when there is a red light can be off by up to 90 degrees. When you use Survey close enough to the fragment a lootable item will appear. If you are colorblind you can also determine how close you are by looking at how fast the light is blinking, red blinks very slowly, yellow a bit faster, and green very fast.

Other players doing Archaeology near you will not be able to see your surveying or take your fragments and you cannot do the same to them.

Four digsites are available at any one time per continent (Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, Outland, and Northrend) and you are able to find 3 lootable fragments at each site. Each lootable fragment gives you 2-7 (based on skill level) fragments that are used to recreate ancient object and eventually fun-items such as mounts or pets. At max level you will get 3, 4, or 6 fragments each time you loot, with Dwarves getting 3, 5, or 7 because of their Explorer racial. The fragments are somewhat like a form of currency and have no actual item associated with them. When you loot all 3 fragments in a digsite you can no longer dig there and a new area will show up on your map.

As of 4.0.6 you can only have up to 200 of any given type of fragment at a time, when you get to 200 any extras will just be wasted until you create some artifacts. If you previously had over 200 you can keep those extras but you still won't be able to gain more until you spend them. The good news is that the vendor price of the common artifacts have increased by huge amounts.

It is also possible to find special items called keystones with most subsections of archaeology; only fossil doesn't have one. You can use these keystones to add 12 fragments to most artifacts on its subsection. You will know if you can use the keystones if there is an empty hexagon on the crafting page. Common artifacts will have 0-2 keystone slots while rares will all have 3 slots (excluding fossil). These keystones can also be traded and sold so this could be one of archaeology's major sources of income.

Gathering fragments from surveying will give you points until 50, at which point only making artifacts will level you up.

Edit: Gathering fragments only gives skill until 50 as of 4.0.6