WOODVILLE — During the week you’ll find David Snow sitting quietly behind a desk at his accounting office, but on the weekend he is trekking through fields and streams looking for buried treasure.

No, he’s not secretly Indiana Jones, but he does share in the character’s enjoyment of finding things left behind by our ancestors.

“I started arrowhead hunting almost four decades ago” Snow said. “It’s something I did with my dad, and now I can also do with my son, Travis.”

This last weekend had the potential to be very exciting for father and son. The pair, along with family friend Levi Steisman, were heading back out to a location close to Clark Creek Natural Area in Wilkinson County that is rumored to be an old hunting camp.

“We’ve found arrowheads in this area before, usually after a nice hard rain,” Snow said. “Sometimes you can find them laying out in the open along creek beds after a rainstorm. Other times, if you’re lucky, you can find broken ones out in freshly plowed fields.”

So they set out, shovels and screens in hand, hopefully to find lost treasures. It would be a two-pronged search, one at the rumored camp and the other along the creek. Hopefully one of these sites would yield a nice find. After hours of digging and sloshing through the creek they were successful. Travis had found two intact arrowheads, and Levi had found three partial ones.

“Sometimes it’s your lucky day, and sometimes its not,” Snow said. “That’s part of the excitement of searching.”

Southern Mississippi isn’t the only place Snow has found his treasures. He’s unearthed arrowheads in Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas and Oklahoma, as well as Ireland.

“Most of my collection is made up of flint arrowheads, but my most valuable one is made of iron,” Snow said. “I found it seven years ago while visiting a friend in Ireland. He’s also an avid arrowhead collector.”

Returning home, David and Travis add their newly acquired pieces to an already large collection. Among the pieces of flint, Snow’s prized find isn’t hard to miss because it looks nothing like the rest of his collection. Like a museum curator, he handles the little lump of metal delicately with cotton gloves. After all, you must be careful with something almost 500 years old.

“I had the arrowhead dated maybe four years go,” Snow said. “The museum in Ireland says it’s an arrowhead from the 16th century. It really is a once and a lifetime find.”