CHAPEL HILL - A study of a portion of the historically black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery has revealed more than 60 likely unmarked graves.

The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill, which sponsored the investigation, will present the report's findings at a free public meeting Feb. 17 at the Horace Williams House.

"This is what we'd hoped to find," said Ernest Dollar, executive director. "We knew there was a large population buried in that part of the cemetery. This gives us a much better sense of where those graves actually are."

The section of the cemetery examined -- a one-third acre portion of what is known as Section B -- was used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a burial place for slaves and freemen. Some of their graves may never have had headstones; most of the others were marked only with rough, uninscribed fieldstones that over the years have been moved, destroyed or otherwise lost. UNC football fans used that portion of the cemetery as an impromptu parking lot for a game in 1985, no doubt damaging or burying some stones, and maintenance workers, unaware that the stones marked graves, used some of them to rebuild stone walls.

Crews from a firm called Environmental Services, Inc., and its subcontractor, Thacker, Seramur and Associates, used ground-penetrating radar and other geophysical techniques to located areas of disturbed subsurface soil that might indicate grave shafts.

The testing identified as many as 62 unmarked graves within the study area, according to the investigators' report. The study lists the sites as "potential" graves, because although the techniques can indicate underground disturances typical of grave shafts, they "cannot fully confirm or refute the presence of a grave shaft."

"The only way to definitively confirm them is to dig them up," Dollar said. "I'm not sure anybody wants to do that. It's impossible to figure out who each individual grave belongs to. But a lot of people who think they have relatives buried there have called us since they heard about this project.

"So the question becomes, how do we mark the site? That's something the public will have to discuss."

One possibility might be a group marker.

"There's a slave cemetery in Hillsborough that does that," Dollar said. "There's a plaque that lists who is buried there, but not exactly where they are, because nobody knows."

The Preservation Society hopes to conduct similar investigations into several other smaller cemeteries known to contain unmarked graves.