GEOPHYSICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF THE OLD CITY CEMETERY IN MURFREESBORO, TN USING GROUND-PENETRATING RADAR

The Old City Cemetery in Murfreesboro, TN is a 3.5-acre site encompassing the buried archaeological remains of the 1820 Old First Presbyterian Church, its burying ground, and the 1837 addition of the city’s first public cemetery. The church was the location of significant social and political events as well as Civil War-related activities. There are approximately 300 extant grave markers in the cemetery. Many grave markers are partially buried or completely underground. Historical documents list other citizen’s burials, but the location is unknown. Hundreds of soldiers from both Union and Confederate armies were buried here temporarily or permanently during the Civil War. However, the exact location of many of these burials is also unknown. The cemetery had fallen into disrepair before 2017 when the Rutherford County Archaeological Society (RCAS) began a project to restore the site. In support of that project, we have used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to characterize the cemetery along with the Foerster Ferex 4.034 magnetometer. Here, we will only be presenting the GPR results. GPR data were acquired using a GSSI 4000 350MHz hyper-stack antenna with 1m line spacing. Survey parameters were set to 100 scans per second with 512 samples per scan. All the 2D GPR lines were imported into RADAN7 and converted to a 3D volume. Data processing sequentially involved time zero adjustment, frequency filtering, background noise removal, and migration. Overall, the data are clean. However, the western side of the survey shows some issues regarding positioning. This may have been caused by an intermittent GPS connection due to heavy vegetation. Results suggest potential burial signatures at depths ranging from 0.5m to 1.5m characterized by high amplitude as the wave is transitioning from background solid to unconsolidated or void structures associated with grave sites. This project demonstrates the value of GPR for archaeological investigations in the southeast US.