Archaeology, next to the first aid profession is considered a busted profession by many. It's tiring, tedious and has very little sales value. At least for the normal player who just looks at the items they "craft" from the pieces and fossils and vendor them.
But a Gold Goblin can see a sale in just about anything of value. In this case we are looking specifically at the buying and selling of race keystones.
On a weak server, these keystones (one for all of the major playable races) ended up lingering on the AH. Sales were weak on many servers (which is an understatement) while on other servers they were brisk and continual.
The major difference between the weak sales on some servers and the positive sales on others was the idea of downtime. What were people looking for?. Almost all of the items obtained from archaeology were Bind on pickup or Bind on Account items. They could only be vendored for little or no gold (even the 100g vendored items were not worth the time taken up to collect.)
One bright spot was that players who had maxxed out both their archealogy and alchemist on the same toon were able to collect pieces and craft the recipe for Vial of the Sands.
The Vial of the Sands was the workhorse for many Archaeology/Alchemist combinations when it came to gold making. Many servers had this mount/transformation item going for 50k per. This is what is going to add a lot of money in your coffers in the next one to two years (this is the expected lifetime of the Mists of Pandaria Expansion according to Blizzard/Activision)
I've been a proponent of having big ticket craftable items in your gold making arsenal. I'm sure many people think my preaching about the Mechano-hog/Mekgineers chopper has become tedious til they start selling two or three a month and add an extra 10,000 gold into their goblin pockets. Both of these mounts will be important since many players won't grind out the recipes but will want the mount for themselves. Rarity always means a premium in a seller run market.
So to answer my original question. Yes, you can make money with Archaeology. With the right information and market place it can become a nice stepping stone to increase your profits.
Here is a link to a quick guide to Archaeology and how to level it quickly.
Archaeology Guide
Vial of the Sands Guide (courtesy of How-To-Warcraft.com)
Good Luck and Good Hunting
Want to get in contact with me? . Email me at Dragonbearjoe @ gmail. dOT com or find me on twitter at "@Dragonbearjoe" or leave a comment here. You can find me hanging out on the Shandris Server, chat me up and I will buy you a glass of juice.
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