Seismic imaging of the Elberton granite in the Georgia Inner Piedmont was undertaken to define its shape and to determine its relation to the southern Appalachian thrust. The recent Consortium for Continental Reflection Profiling (COCORP) lines in the southern Appalachians suggest a major thrusting of a crystalline block over sediments, although the extent of this thrust is subject to interpretation. The fine-grained Elberton, of Late Devonian age, is the only major pluton crossed by the seismic traverse and is not well defined on the unmigrated common depth point (CDP) seismic section. Migration by beam-forming reveals considerable variation in the direction of returning signal and provides a clearer image of the laminated reflections, ubiquitous in the southern Appalachians, which have been intepreted as the equilvalents of the Valley and Ridge sediments beneath an allochthonous sheet. The upper 5 km portions of the migrated and CDP sections lack events, probably because of the necessary stripping (mute) of a large-amplitude, early arrival from the seismic records before further processing. Filtering, and transformation of the data to the intercept-slowness domain, to eliminate this interfering arrival are attempted to enhance the upper portion of the seismic sections. Although these approaches do not give a consistent picture of the shallow section, a pattern of scatterers located at depths of 2--3.5 km emerges: these may correlate with the base of the intrusive body. This identification of the granite base, along with the presence of the thrust-related reflectors beneath the pluton, suggests a prethrust or synthrust emplacement of the granite. However, tectonic interpretations of the Inner Piedmont based on the Elberton granite are severely limited by assumptions: that the pluton age corresponds to time of cooling, that the pluton is not fed by a narrow (seismically elusive) feeder, and that the thrust has not been reactivated after emplacement of the intrusive body. If all these assumptions hold, then the Late Devonian age of the granite is the earliest possible time of thrusting.