Covered over for a couple of hundred years, a British-built Revolutionary War fort at Ebenezer shows up perfectly on Dan Elliott's ground-penetrating radar as a set of squiggly lines.

Just a few feet away, radar shows more squiggly lines, this time indicating several graves outside the cemetery fence.

"The story of the dead here is really interesting, and complicated," said Elliott, who, since 1987, has been worked on several projects at Ebenezer.

President of the LAMAR Institute, a nonprofit archaeological research organization that has conducted digs and studies throughout Georgia, Elliott is presently charting what's beneath the ground at Ebenezer under the auspices of the Georgia Salzburger Society.

The primary objective of the project is to determine the exact parameters of the cemetery, said Salzburger Society President Noble L. Boykin. The Salzburgers and their descendents have lived in the Ebenezer area since the mid-1730s.

Once Elliott has finished plotting the unmarked Salzburger graves, the society and Jerusalem Lutheran Church will find an appropriate way to mark the cemetery's boundaries and commemorate those who lay beyond them, Boykin said.

Elliott, who painstakingly plans, records and stores each radar sweep, is also working to set the lines of a separate cemetery that's located just south of the large Salzburger plot, this one containing an unknown number of African Americans.

None of the graves are marked, and some of them predate the Civil War, Elliott said.

Occasional body-length depressions in the earth mark where people are buried, said Dawn Chapman, a graduate student at the University of York, who has been working with Elliott.

Walking through the wooded area, Elliott would point where he'd found graves, and said at one point that "you can see a little cluster here where a family has been buried together."

A small marker, set in the ground, reads "Sacred to the memory of those African Americans whose remains rest in this place."

Although he's found and precisely marked the octagonal-shaped earthen fort that was built in 1779 to guard the entrance to Ebenezer, Elliott has been unsuccessful in locating the remains of the soldiers who died while serving there and at several adjacent strong-points.

"We don't have a clue where the military cemeteries are," he said.

He does, however, have a pretty good idea of how many British and Americans soldiers passed away while stationed at Ebenezer, an important stop on the old Augusta Road that changed hands several times during the Revolutionary War.

According to the unit rosters, it appears that some 500 soldiers on each side died there of natural causes, said Elliott.

A book written by a British doctor, "A Treatise on the Fevers of Jamaica," delineated the suffering of the Redcoats and Hessians in the Georgia Lowcountry.

"They were just dying like flies out here, and the doctors didn't know what to do to help them," Elliott said, adding that the Americans scarcely fared better.

The octagonal fort was filled in by American soldiers in 1782. It was such a good job "that you can't see any traces of it" from the surface, Elliott said.