
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, November 6, 1993                   TAG: 9311060030
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CIVIL WAR RESEARCH ENTERS THE NEXT CENTURY

An airplane fitted with sophisticated radar and cameras invented for spy planes and satellites flew over the Antietam and Manassas battlefields this week on a high-technology archaeological hunt for unmarked graves and hidden Civil War artifacts.

The flight allowed the National Park Service, which oversees the battlefields, to scan hundreds of acres quickly and cheaply. The haste of combat resulted in dozens of unmarked graves at the two battlefields. This week's search may help guide Park Service workers to those graves before they are found by looters in search of Civil War relics.

"We're going to find some [graves] on the [Antietam] battlefield itself, no question about it," said Stephen R. Potter, regional archaeologist for the Park Service. He believes there are dozens of undiscovered burial areas - particularly of Confederate soldiers - at Antietam, the Maryland battlefield where 23,110 men were killed, wounded or never found on Sept. 17, 1862, the bloodiest day in U.S. combat history.

"We want to make sure those sites are protected," Potter said.

The flight was donated to the Park Service by the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan, a private, nonprofit laboratory that owns the plane and wants to expand its civilian uses.

The Park Service hopes to obtain Pentagon funding and use the images from Antietam and the Bull Run battlefields at Manassas to develop a "signature" of an unmarked grave that could help find more modern burial grounds.

The flight also may uncover campsites, trails, buildings or other Civil War-era features of the land, Potter said. Historians know, for example, that a now-destroyed orchard played a role in the combat at Manassas, and Park Service officials would like to find it.

The institute's twin-engine Convair 580, built in 1959, has a conventional cockpit but some gee-whiz equipment in the cabin - two high-resolution cameras and synthetic aperture radar, which penetrates clouds, foliage and even the ground.

The plane has been used mainly for U.S. and foreign missions to verify nuclear and other weapons installations under international treaties. The radar technology, about two decades old, also has been used on spy planes and on NASA's Magellan mission to map the planet Venus.

But with the Cold War now in deep freeze, the search is on to find civilian applications for military technology. So the environmental institute is marketing its equipment to clients such as energy companies exploring for new oil fields, or cities seeking more precise maps.

The radar pulses bounce off the land and back to the aircraft, and the radar's digitized tape is turned into photographic images later at the institute's Ann Arbor, Mich., lab.

by CNB