Exploration in the southeastern United States is complicated by the presence of a variably thick saprolite horizon. Developing new techniques for locating ore bodies in deeply weathered terrain has become essential to the success of exploration geologists working in the Carolina Slate Belt (CSB) of South Carolina. The results presented here provide a mechanism to overcome this difficulty by applying a Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA) to geochemical data taken from the saprolite horizon over a known ore deposit at 5 depth.Using As, Co, Cs, Cu, Fe, Hf, La, Mn, Ni, Pb, Sb, Sc, V, W, and Zn, the DFA can accurately classify 80% of the samples taken from the first 5 of saprolite into the groups they were assigned, which include: non-gold-bearing barren metavolcanic rocks, gold-bearing mineralized metasediments, and non-gold-bearing barren metasediments. This technique can serve as an important tool for locating ore bodies under cover in the CSB.