High-tech search fails to uncover cemetery's secretsby Connie Cone Sexton -- The Arizona Republic |
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| They had
hoped to unlock some of the mysteries of what lies beneath the dirt in
the narrow lot of the Russian Molokan Cemetery. Two University of Arizona [PhD] graduate students spent Friday morning sweeping [scanning] the dirt with their ground-penetrating radar [GPR] equipment, trying to survey the land. The equipment operates above ground and produces cross-sectional images on a screen showing objects below that are not soil [, or are holes filled with disturbed soil]. The mining and geo-engineering students had been hired by the Glendale Arizona Molokan Church to find graves at the 2-acre [1-acre] cemetery, which is across from Independence High School on 75th Avenue just south of Glendale Avenue. |
Dozens of
people are buried in the cemetery, but church records are incomplete [non-existent]. The cemetery dates to 1911. Fires over the years have destroyed some of the wooden grave markers, according to church member Andrew Conovaloff. Unfortunately, the students' [university's] radar equipment couldn't penetrate the high clay content soil, and Conovaloff isn't sure what the church members will do next in their efforts to have a historic record of the cemetery. One of the goals of the survey was to find where the graves were of children who had died during the 1918 flu epidemic. Conovaloff said the church also would like to discover where a row of tamarisk trees had been planted. |
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