Judaculla Rock is a curvilinear soapstone outcrop whose slanted face carries one of the densest petroglyph records in the eastern United States. A detailed count published through UNC's Commemorative Landscapes project records at least 1,458 cup marks, 47 curvilinear units, ten bowl-shaped depressions, and a scatter of deer tracks, rings, and human-like figures, on roughly 240 square feet of surface. The boulder also carries quarry scars where Native people cut soapstone bowls out of the soft stone, and neighboring outcrops in the same 15-acre area show similar quarrying. Archaeologists date the carvings to the Late Woodland through Late Mississippian periods, roughly AD 500 to 1700, with the oldest marks likely predating Cherokee settlement of the region.

The Cherokee connection runs through the ethnographer James Mooney, who recorded in the 1880s the legend of Tsul 'Kalu, the Slant-Eyed Giant, a great hunter said to live on Richland Balsam Mountain who could control wind, rain, and thunder and who leapt from the mountain to the rock, leaving his prints. Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians communities continue to regard the boulder as culturally significant and have taken part in preservation work, including a 2009-2010 conservation project that added the elevated walkway and viewing platform to stop decades of direct contact. Jackson County owns and maintains the site today, and it is signed, fenced, and open without charge.

Visiting

Jackson County maintains the site at 552 Judaculla Rock Road, Cullowhee, North Carolina: open daylight hours, free, with gravel parking across the road and a raised viewing platform with interpretive signs; county contact (828) 586-2155.

Photo: [CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Judaculla_Rock.jpg)

Associated traditions & practices

Native American Traditions