Stone Sites in Lenape Country
Submitted by aluta on Tuesday, 06 January 2004 Page Views: 7417
Neolithic and Bronze Age
The more common sites, usually complexes combining walls, cairns, and boulders, are fascinating, especially after you've seen several of them, but the involvement of the Indians presents the most intriguing aspects. Members of the Lenape Nation got involved when one of the local white men, the main researcher of the stone sites in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, contacted a newspaper about the impending demolition of a site he'd been visiting and researching. After an article about the site and the impending development appeared in the paper, a member of the Lenape Nation came forward, to the researcher's amazement and delight, claiming the place was a sacred site of his people.
For some time after that, the Indians, or, some say, alleged Indians, as their ancestry tends to be mixed, co-operated with those who were working to preserve these sites, even to the extent of attending a 2 day conference, and accompanying a large group of people, including archaeologists, to many stone sites.
There is no doubt, both from documentation and from talking with these people, that the area around the Delaware River is the sacred homeland of the Lenape people. According to the Indians, or natives (this group preferred the word Indian, saying anyone born here is native), they still perform the rituals for the land and rivers performed by their parents and grandparents, and probably their ancestors before them, often on the traditional sites. They believe it is their responsibility, as the people who belong to this place, to perform these rituals.
The Indians I spoke with may have been less than candid, and with good historical reasons. The chief at the time said that the site at Oley Hills had something to do with rituals regarding crops, but I can't vouch for the truth of that. The Pleiades, from what I can tell, figured prominently in their measuring of the year and in the configuration of some of the sites.
Rites of passage, such as fasting and a sort of sense deprivation experience may also be performed at some of these sites. When we asked the chief at the time about a small, stone-lined pit we'd found, he said it was probably used for the rite of passage to adulthood for teenage boys. I have heard other members of the group talking about vision quest-type experiences out on the hills for days, not eating and not speaking. Some members of the Lenape live in Oklahoma, chased there by the US's egregious handling of their people earlier in our history. The Indians I met say the Oklahoma people are awe-struck when they return here, to stand in the sacred homeland of their people.
One researcher had the opportunity to speak at length with one of their elders. When asked why the sites were in certain places, the elder explained that long ago, before radio and TV waves were traveling through the air, before there were airplanes and trucks causing low vibrations to resound everywhere, and before the current culture changed the way people use their attention, certain places had what he thought might compare to electromagnetic radiation, an energy that people who knew the land well could feel. Different kinds of sites might be built in places that had different kinds of energies. Boulders that already had shapes that seemed to represent sacred symbols may also have been considered to indicate a sacred place.
I hope this information will add to your sense of these sites and what they represent. Many have been destroyed, and that process continues, because almost no one recognizes these sites as old or interesting, and because the Lenape and other Indians of the north-eastern U.S. are for some reason seen as incapable of getting the idea of putting one stone on top of another.
One more thing--there were many underground stone chambers in our area at one time, but it was considered great sport to put dynamite in them and watch them blow up when dynamite became widely available. On one farm, for example, the owner told a researcher that there had been 7 of the "root cellars", but 5 were blown up. We think that some of these chambers were mortared and used for storage by colonials.
Again and again I have heard from locals about caves or underground stone chambers that have been blown up (for children's safety!) or filled in. People suggest they were built by the Germans when they arrived here, but they are just about identical to those in areas settled by various other Europeans, and often placed in sites near streams, where they flood and seem unfit for any kind of storage. It is easy to speculate, but with no evidence, that they would have made good enclosures for the sweat baths that the earliest Europeans who arrived here remarked upon in their writings about the Lenape.
This is a quick overview, including only the points that I thought might interest readers on the Portal. I could go on and on, given the time and an interested victim--I mean listener. Questions are welcome, but replies may come slowly.
Note: An article written exclusively for the Portal by aluta.
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