McKees Rocks Mound: Two Thousand Years Underground

In McKees Rocks stood the largest Native American burial mound in Pennsylvania, much of it later lost to quarrying. Indigenous people of the Adena culture built it by hand, hauling basket-loads of earth to raise a great mound above the rivers. Later peoples, including the Hopewell, also used this sacred ground.

In the late nineteenth century, excavations uncovered thirty-three skeletons along with objects made of copper and shell that point to long-distance trade. The mound is a reminder that this confluence of rivers was a center of human activity for many centuries before any European set eyes on it. The Ohio Country was not empty land waiting to be discovered.