Holes are dug in 10 meter intervals.
Bill Hunt is an archeologist for the National Park Service.
The dirt is sifted through wire mesh to find any possisble artifacts.
Deep in the woods, near a stream in Hot Springs National Park, they dig.
And with each shovel full of dirt, there is anticipation that something - something perhaps thousands of years old will be found.
"There's a lot of archeology back here, both historic and pre-historic," says Bill Hunt, who is an archeologist with the National Park Service.
He leads a team from Lincoln, Nebraska exploring a site first discovered in 1974 by a young archeologist from Fayetteville.
Hunt explains, "He found some, what people would call arrowheads. They're really dart points or parts of stone knives that have been re-sharpened that date back three to six thousand years old. And we have actually recovered a couple of those points."
Thirty years ago bulldozers were preparing the area for a campsite. The discovery cancelled those plans and the forest quickly reclaimed the ground.
Today, the team digs small holes in 10 meter intervals, sifting through the clay and dirt, looking for small flakes of a specific kind of rock. And hoping to determine the actual site of what may have been a pre-historic hunting camp.
"So we're finding small pieces of nevaculite, well mostly nevaculite, "says Archeology Tech Melissa Baier. "So we're finding just these small flakes of rock."
The flakes are pieces of rocks knocked off as an arrowhead or knife was sharpened.
Baier continues, "They tell us something. They tell us what types of material they were using to build their tools out of. It tells us where they were making their tools. And if we get enough money to run the chemical test, it will also tell us what quarries they were obtaining their materials from."
Any finds are noted for location and depth. Back in Nebraska, archeologists will create a chart of their findings, to determine where the greatest concentration of artifacts may be found.
Were these the remnants of people who lived here? Or was this just a place where they stopped to sharpen their knives?
Or might they have even created their knives and arrows here - to trade with a people far away?
They are questions the park service archeologists hope to answer someday soon.