One day on a promontory in McKees Rocks, a boy named James J. Westwood used a bat to hunt for a baseball and struck a human shin bone instead.
Westwood’s buddies gathered around and, using sticks, dug up an entire skeleton, which they threw over the bluff.
Word of the find reached the Carnegie Museum. About a year later, in the summer of 1896, Frank Gerrodette led the museum’s first archaeological excavation of the largest Indian burial mound in Pennsylvania and found 33 skeletons.
My first visit to the mound yesterday at dusk was rather magical. My pal and I learned from this guy who was spraying water onto some piece of metal how best to ascend the mound, that last year’s scheme to whittle away at it further had been halted, and some odds and ends about the solstice ceremony and more recent rituals conducted there. From the top of the toponymous rocks (more of a cliff, really) you can look out over Brunot Island at the downtown skyline and get a sense of why this area was sacred to the mound builders.
Who were they? A cursory search unearthed this weirdly phrased investigation into the formation and spread of Adena culture:
UNIFORMITY OF ARTIFACTS throughout the Adena area suggests more centralized government than centralizing Poverty Point, increasingly stratified, authoritarian control largely via funerary and other ceremonialism. The incredible spread from its large central nucleus looked like imperial expansion but N.Y. state archaeologist William Ritchie & Carnegie Museum archaeologist Don Dragoo 1957-58 realized a Hopewell-driven Adena refugee exodus. Ritchie had reported 1937 in some astonishment at least 6 blocked-end Adena limestone pipes with other typical artifacts such as earspools and bird pendants that had turned up 1923 in Pine Valley, N.Y. mound burials on the east shore of Canandaigua Lake, subsequently in central and eastern New York near Amber on Otisco Lake and near Hoffman in Schenectady County, also at a large cemetery near Palatine Bridge in Montgomery County and in Mohawk Valley, N.Y. at Stillwater and North New York at the foot of Grindstone Island in St. Lawrence River, etc. By 1936 he had been startled to find Adena in New England—pipes, bird pendants, earspools, etc. recurring in a wide swath of mounds. Dragoo later had a similar experience in the upper Ohio Valley, where scattered village sites bore typical blocked-end ceramic cigar-pipes, “reel-shaped gorgets” (earspools), rectangular wrist-guards which he and Ritchie called gorgets, stemmed points, Fayette Thick potsherds, etc. McKees Rocks Mound at Pittsburgh stands the easternmost large Adena mound. There the movement divided, groups splaying northward through the Allegheny Valley into SW New York, those south up the Monongahela. No definitely known Adena mounds rise along the Allegheny, but several village sites dot, and stray artifacts strew.
- Dr. Cyclone Covey, “Poverty Point to Mississippian“
The Mound has also been pegged for a node in the ley line grid system or “planetary matrix” as this fellow terms it.
Grid Longitude 111 (deg) x 11 (min) x 2.005042979 (sec) = 2448.157478 W.Giza
= 248.0502134 x (Pi Squared)
= Great Pyramid Grid Point Value times (Pi Squared)
Grid Latitude 40 (deg) x 28 (min) x 20.601197 (sec) = 23073.34064 North
= 23378.18185 x (Pi Squared) / 10
= Sun Pyramid Grid Latitude times (Pi Squared) divided-by 10
Note : 23073.34064 is an exact decimal harmonic of my proposed height, in regular inches (as opposed to “pyramid inches”), for The King’s Chamber within The Great Pyramid . . . 230.7334064 regular inches. This figure (the decimal harmonic, that is) can be derived by Squaring the original height of The Great Pyramid (see Carl P. Munck) in regular Feet . . . (480.3471728) Squared = 230733.4064
Grid Point Value 23073.34064 / 2448.157478 = 9.424777959
= 3Pi
We know, from Carl Munck’s work, that 3Pi is a major number at Giza.
- Michael Lawrence Morton, “Some Pittsburgh Area ‘Code Sites’“
Aside from the mystical aspects of the Mound, it also played a role in the region’s military and political history. George Washington poopooed a plan to build a fort on the Mound (deeming it strategically and logistically “greatly inferior” to the Point). Almost a century ago, during the famous steel workers’ strike, everyone’s favorite “anarchist sympathizer” and Vonnegut-inspirer Eugene Debs roused some serious rabble from the Mound.
If you get a chance to visit, do your own rituals, rouse your own rabble, get charged up by the geomantic energy, and/or just relax respectfully.
The Mound, I suspect, has much to offer yet.
