Archaeologist and Historian Patrick O’Neil presented “Archaeology in Cemeteries: Grave Locating and Marker Interpretation” – a report and discussion of his participation and findings in a 2005 survey of Fairfax City’s Ratcliffe Cemetery. The wooded and overgrown tract required extensive probing at one-foot intervals to discover and unearth buried markers and artifacts. Careful terrain analysis located previously unidentified burial shafts. An especially important discovery was the presence of Civil War burials of both Confederate and Union soldiers in the same section of the cemetery. A field stone marker and several graves of Confederate soldiers were identified. A Union Army report correlated with several dozen burial shafts make it clear that Union soldiers were buried there and later moved probably to their hometowns for reburial.
