  The role that minor mergers have played in the formation and structure of the
Milky Way is still an open question, about which there is much debate. We use
numerical simulations to explore the evolution of debris from a tidally
disrupted satellite, with the aim of developing a method that can be used to
identify and quantify signatures of accretion in a survey of halo stars. For a
Milky Way with a spherical halo, we find that debris from minor mergers can
remain aligned along great circles throughout the lifetime of the Galaxy. We
exploit this result to develop the method of Great Circle Cell Counts (GC3),
which we test by applying it to artificially constructed halo distributions.
Our results suggest that if as few as 1\% of the stars in a halo survey are
accreted from the disruption of a single subsystem smaller than the Large
Magellanic Cloud, GC3 can recover the great circle associated with this debris.
The dispersion in GC3 can also be used to detect the presence of structure
characteristic of accretion in distributions containing a much smaller
percentage of material accreted from any single satellite.
