Marietta City Council will consider legislation Thursday to designate $49,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds for Mound Cemetery surveying, mapping and grave locating.

The $49,000 will cover all three geophysical survey techniques offered by Columbus contractor Ohio Valley Archaeology Inc.: a ground-penentrating radar survey, a magnetometer survey and an electromagnetic conductivity survey.

Those three operations will complement the Base Work model, which supplies gridding and mapping in the field and stone digitizing, which creates a map of headstone and footstone markers .

The survey and mapping work would cover 3.5 acres of the cemetery and would take about nine or 10 days of field work. It would include the older portions and exclude the mound and newer graves near the southern end of the cemetery. A successful geophysical survey would produce a map of all aboveground markers and all below-ground indications of graves, according to Mike Ryan, one of the Washington County Historical Society members who has been working in the cemetery to identify graves needing markers and to locate graves in plots with irregular boundaries.

At a council Finance Committee meeting in February, Ryan said the group has been able so far to identify 50 old tombstones.

“But we have at least 425 people that we don’t know clearly where they are because the plots are irregular,” he said.

At that time, he proposed that the city get help from the archaeological contractor and outlined the services and costs. Committee members asked him to get feedback from local experts on what exactly they recommended.

Ryan returned to a council committee meeting of Lands, Buildings and Parks last Thursday and said the city administration wanted to employ all three surveying techniques available.

Information supplied by OVAI said ground-penetrating radar is the most widely known technique and often works the best for locating subsurface graves. The other two techniques, the magnetometer and electromagnetic conductivity survey, are excellent complementary techniques to radar and often detect graves and other features the radar cannot, the company said.

The report also pointed out that a multiple instrument survey could enhance the detection of archaeological features within the cemetery that might be related to the mound and circular enclosure.

Ryan emphasized another element that is relevant to funding the project. If the locations of all the existing graves are pinpointed, there will be land that can be designated as clear for more plots to be sold.

“It looks like it can literally pay for itself,” he said.

Bill Reynolds, who attended the February meeting, noted that OVAI is a very reputable organization that has done work at Camp Tucker and Blennerhassett Island.

Councilmen Bill Gossett and Bill Farnsworth have indicated their support for the project, saying it will be very useful to the area’s overall history as well as being helpful to families of the deceased. Marietta Public Safety and Service Director Steve Wetz told the committee Thursday, “The administration supports this in its entirety.”