Miles down Fort Gordon's Range Road, the blacktop gives way to a white sandy pass that cuts through the thick pine forest.
The tires on Robert Drumm's pickup appear to slide a bit as he heads deeper through the trees, where the pines give way to hardwoods.
It's there -- in a spot indistinguishable from any other in the vast wooded expanse that makes up the post's interior -- that Army researchers are looking for the remains of people who lived, and died, in the long-gone community of Pinetucky.
"Based on our plots, there are 22 other sites like this that are potential cemeteries," said Drumm, the chief of the Fort Gordon Natural Resources Branch.
Since Wednesday, archaeologists from the Army Corps of Engineers in Illinois have been using ground-penetrating radar to look for unmarked gravesites at five potential cemeteries on post. Army officials hope to relocate a drop zone, but before they begin cutting into the forest, they want to be sure there are no bodies buried in the area. So far, they've scanned three of the potential cemeteries and it's likely there are gravesites in at least one of them, Mike Hargrave said. Some of the areas are well clear of the planned drop zone, including the one where Hargrave said the archaeologists had the strongest indication of gravesites.
But the site dubbed "Cemetery 31," where Hargrave and cohort Carey Baxter worked Friday, lies right on the edge of the proposed area.
Hargrave and Baxter walk the radar, which resembles a car battery with a handle and cart wheel attached, over the bumpy forest floor in the hopes of getting a strong signal -- the kind that indicates a burial site underneath. That's made easier because the soil in this location is particularly sandy and less likely to disperse the radar.
"The idea is if there is a grave here, that is a very localized energy and we're hoping we can catch that energy," Hargrave said.
At one point they get a promising hit, which shows up as a fuzzy black dot on a computer screen.
But the terrain isn't ideal, and Hargrave said they would have to do more checking to be sure it wasn't just a tree root.
"This is archaeology," he said. "This is what we deal with."
Before 1941, when the U.S. government took over the more than 56,000 acres that now make up Fort Gordon, the area was a farming community.
The families who lived in Pinetucky were displaced when the military rushed to build a training camp near Augusta in anticipation of American involvement in World War II. Homes and churches were abandoned and torn down as the Army constructed the post, but many of the old family plots remain.
Today, the Army maintains 45 cemeteries with 646 graves at Fort Gordon, Drumm said. Graves date back as far as 1827. Drumm said the fort still gets requests from the descendants of those buried on post to be interred in the old family plots. The latest happened in 2005, he said.
"If you have a family cemetery and there is space in that cemetery, you can be buried in it," Drumm said.
But it's unlikely anyone would be laid to rest in the spot where Hargrave and Baxter worked Friday. A few bricks and some foxholes that were most likely dug in the mid-1960s are all that passes for a marker in this part of the forest.
If any gravesites are found at Cemetery 31, Drumm said they have two options: moving the gravesites or moving the drop zone.
Most likely, they would leave the site.
"This area, if we do find bodies out here, would be cut out of the project," Drumm said. "We really don't want to dig up anybody and move them. They are good where they are."
Source: The Augusta Chronicle