Judaculla Rock

1,548 carvings on one boulder, and the handprint of the Cherokee Master of Game

A curved outcrop of soapstone beside Caney Fork Creek in the mountains of western North Carolina, carrying more petroglyphs than any other known boulder east of the Mississippi: about 1,548 motifs, among them 1,458 cup marks, stick figures, concentric rings, deer tracks and claw prints. Scars in the stone show that Late Archaic people quarried soapstone bowls out of it thousands of years ago, and the carvings were pecked over those scars later, somewhere between about 200 and 1400 CE. What they mean is still open: picture maps of the surrounding country, fertility marks, or a threshold between the everyday world and the world of spirits. The Cherokee account is the oldest. Judaculla, the slant-eyed Master of Game, leapt from his mountaintop to drive off trespassing hunters and landed with his hand on the soft rock, scratching it with his fingernail. The Eastern Band and the Cherokee tribes of Oklahoma still hold the boulder sacred. Jackson County owns the site, with a viewing platform and signs.