Native American Ritual Stone Construction in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Region

This event is free to the public.

In centuries past, Native American peoples of the Southeast built thousands of stone structures for ritual purposes. The illustrated talk will focus on native stone structures in the Blue Ridge region of Virginia, describing their forms and proposing interpretations consistent with what is known about Southeastern Native American cultures and beliefs through ethnography and analysis of material culture.

Dan Pezzoni is an architectural historian with the nationwide preservation consulting firm Landmark Preservation Associates based in Lexington, Virginia. He is the author of the National Register of Historic Places designation report for Floyd County’s Phlegar House and wrote “Blacksburg: An Architectural Overview,” a chapter in A Special Place for 200 Years: A History of Blacksburg, Virginia (1998). Since 2020 he has seen or documented thousands of native stone structures from Vermont to Colorado.