[Music Plays] Welcome to OnQ Magazine, I'm Michael Bartley.

While Pittsburgh celebrates its 250th anniversary, it's important to remember the native cultures were here long before the Europeans.

Evidence of these earlier civilizations stone carvings called petroglyphs are still around today.

The carvings are hundreds, even thousands of years old.

And tonight, OnQ photojournalist Pierina Morelli takes you to the upper Allegheny River to show you this ancient form of communication, Set In Stone!

[Music Plays] Petroglyphs are figures incised on the rock.

We'd like to think of by Native Americans.

They've been around here from anywhere from 900 years to 500 years.

The engraving on this site, done by the Native Americans, have been pecked with a stone and then rubbed smooth with another stone, and most of them are fairly broad.

They have a U-shaped bottom.

Some of the work that they did was used by or, you know, they put on antler down and pounded on it, whic we would have hammered a chisel.

But this work was done crudely.

The state has 13 recorded petroglyph sites here in the what we call the Upper Ohio Basin that runs from Parkersburg, West Virginia, up to Indian Guard Rock, which is near Franklin, PA.

There are three different groups.

There's a group here in the upper Allegheny Valley.

There's a group on the Monongahela River, and there's also a group on the lower Allegheny and also the the Ohio River proper.

[Music Plays] This is the Parker's Landing petroglyph site.

It's the first site that was ever recorded in Khan County, Pennsylvania.

[Music Plays] This is one of the few places in in western Pennsylvania where Pennsylvania period, that you can actually go and stand and say, here it is exactly as it was when the Native Americans were here.

The rocks that are exposed today haven't moved for a thousand years or more.

It probably held some religious or educational or tribal significance to the people that created them.

There are six panels here, and I think we have 179 prehistoric figures recorded at this site.

Panel number one is underneath the first set of ripples you see to the north of us, and it consists of a human head with 4 or 5 lines radiating from the top of the head that appear to be commonly called power lines, but may represent some type of a headdress.

The otter at Parker is the biggest figure in the site.

It's about 13ft long from head to tail.

It's in an outline form, and what's unique about this figure are not totally unique, but what's different is that it does have two in size lines across the body.

That's called lifelines among people that deal with pictographs and petroglyphs.

The lifelines usually help indicate that this is a spirit animal representation.

[Waves Crashing] And you see it with the spiritual lines in all of the drawings.

Or a lot of the petroglyphs have spiritual lines in them, and the animals all had a spirit.

And and they thought highly o these animals and, and actually, you know, it's not like they worshiped them, but they thought of them.

They had some good feelings about them, and they all were significant in something that they did.

The Algonquin has speaking Indians up through this area, Ohio, and up into the Midwest, have a legend of a creature called Michi, and it's an antlered underwater panther.

The Michi Peshwa lived in the rapids and in legend was noted for upsetting canoes and drowning people, and generally being what we think of as one of the dens of the deep.

We think that the majority of them were made after 1000 AD by Native Americans that were living in permanent or semi-permanent villages, practicing horticulture, raising corn, beans and squash, living in fortified settlements on a year round basis.

[Car Driving] Rainbow rocks is a it's a it's a very big rock overhang.

It's what we call a rock shelter.

The Native Americans camped underneath this shelter, and it's probably located on a remnant of what's called the Frankston Venango Trail.

That's when you were excavating the site here was in 1954?

54 and 55, yeah!

And you found the you found the petroglyphs when you were excavating this?

Yeah!

I just started the center over in here, close to the wall.

Dick Ziegler discovered the site, and I believe it was in the late 1950s.

He was actually excavating in there.

And Dick's story is that he took a break from excavating and leaned up against the rock.

And I just glanced over and I thought, well, those looked like impressions in the rock.

And then I got closer and started sizing it up.

And I know a lot of people see knows maybe didn't pay any attention to them.

I thought it was maybe erosion in the rock or that, but I suddenly realized there were figures that had been carved in the rock, the head of a snake, and the body of a snake coming down through here.

There's a second snake up here with the body coming down through here, wha we call a turkey track or a bird track here and here.

There's also another one here.

And then there's.

And it's very hard to see, but there's another the head of the snake here and a body coming down here at the bottom of this turkey.

It's very difficult to see in here.

There's a human figure and there's a head right here of a human figure.

There's two arms coming up here on each side, the body and the two legs out at the bottom here.

We'll see that on some of the other sites to with the stance of a man with his arms spread very wide and his legs spread kind of in a, in an upright or a dancing position or some type of an awareness position with his arms up.

[Music Plays] I think it tells story because when I talk to Leo Milford, the game commissioner, a young fella, he said, out here there's a lot of rattlesnakes, there's copperheads.

And I thought, well, here's the copperheads, here's the rattlesnakes with the crosses on the tail, rattlesnakes.

And at that time he told me he said, a lot of game out here, a lot of turkey.

And here, these were turkey tracks.

What they see, Thompson figured.

So I think it was a hunting experience that they've had out here.

What they actually meant though, we don't know and we probably never know.

Those people were long gone and have no living descendants in this area.

[Music Plays] It's very interesting to be able to sit here and ponder what's been put there a thousand years ago by somebody, and in your mind to try to decipher what that person was trying to tell us.

We have no idea.

You know, we can look at them, we can make assumptions.

But to be truthful, that culture was so radically different from what we see today.

And you know what?

What are people going to think about us 1000 or 2000 years from now?

[Music Plays] Right now, most of these sites are not being preserved.

They're constantly being eroded by the elements and vandalized with graffiti and modern day carvings.

Local archeologists would like to see these sites protected.