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 Spiritual Christian
Molokan
Cemetery. Two University of Arizona doctoral graduate students spent Friday morning scanning sweeping the ground 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 congregation |
Dozens of people are buried in the cemetery, but congregation church records do not exist
Fires over the years have destroyed some of the wooden grave markers, according to congregation church member Andrew Conovaloff. Unfortunately, the university's students' radar equipment couldn't penetrate the high clay content soil, and Conovaloff isn't sure what the congregation 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 congregation church also would like to discover where a row of tamarisk trees had been planted. |
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More about GPR for grave location |
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