Finding gold is not the value.
I excavated a broken saddle quern. Used daily to grind grain for their bread. Worn to shape by the work of someone working at it, day in day out. The context put that quern at around 2,500 bce. That means that someone made and used it four and a half thousand years ago.
It tells us other things too though; it means they were farming grain suitable for grinding for flour. It tells us that they were tilling the land, and they were trading, or otherwise in contact with a farming network that stretched from the Fertile Crescent all the way to rural Lanarkshire, for the grains are not native to the British Isles.
To have grain, they had health and resources enough to support a population capable of opening up the land for farming, a knowledge of the seasons the skills to make the tools that allowed them to plough, plant, cut and harvest their crops.
We found the evidences of their houses and their hearths, the pollen record showed the effects that their farming and lifestyles had on the surrounding woodlands. The few bones found in their site told us a little more about their husbandry, and their hunting. The flint scatters and the tiny flint cores told us about another trading network, flint is not native here either............so what did they have that was valuable enough to trade over distance to exchange ?
And the story goes on, and on.
Supposing this had been a hoard site, ripped apart for the few scraps of metal, for truthfully that's all gold is, and it's relatively common in the Earth's crust. We would have had none of the context that allows the details to be recorded, properly analysed. None of the undamaged stratigraphy.
As I said, good metal detectorists are excellent. The few selfish ones are a destructive force that blights the historical record, and the past belongs to us all, not just a few thieving blighters.
cheers,
Toddy