News & Events

Preservation Month

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Sunday, May 18, 2025, 2 p.m.

Kendal Auditorium

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Dan Pezzoni, Architectural Historian, presents:​ 

Wrapt In Deep Mystery: Native American Ritual Stone Construction in Rockbridge County

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Virginia is home to thousands of ritual stone structures built by Native American peoples in centuries past. The presentation will focus on structure locales in Rockbridge County and environs, including Cole Mountain, North Mountain Gap, Petites Gap, and House Mountain. The presentation will explain how the piles, cairns, effigies, linear structures, and other architectural forms differ from utilitarian historic-period structures like field clearing piles. Some of the structures are representational, which relates them to the allied medium of rock art. The presentation will propose interpretations consistent with what is known about Southeastern native cultures and beliefs through ethnography and comparison to other forms of material culture. As a reporter with the Rockbridge County News remarked in 1893 about the stone mound that once stood in North Mountain Gap, the structures have “always been wrapt in deep mystery.”

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