Barnesville Petroglyph

About this property

The Barnesville Petroglyph petroglyph site in the eastern part of the U.S. state of Ohio. Located approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) southwest of the village of Barnesville in Belmont County, the petroglyphs have been known both by archaeologists and the general public since the 1850s or earlier. Although the site was significantly damaged during the twentieth century, it is still a significant archaeological site, and has been named a historic site. The Barnesville Petroglyph carvings were created centuries ago by Native American people. The precise cultural affiliation of its creators is uncertain. Some have attributed the site to the Adena, who inhabited the region approximately between 500 BC and AD 300. However, Barnesville shares many similarities with other petroglyph sites in western Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia, and other parts of eastern Ohio; as a result, petroglyph specialist James L. Swauger concluded that it was the work of the people that also created such sites as the Indian God Rock, the Sugar Grove Petroglyphs, and the Hamilton Farm Petroglyphs. Many features of these and similar petroglyph sites in the region indicated to Swauger that they were created by Ojibwe-influenced people of the Monongahela culture, whose earliest presence in the Upper Ohio Valley is believed to have been approximately AD 1200. The petroglyphs are carved into a single large boulder of Dunkard-series sandstone that sits in woodland atop a hill with an elevation of approximately 1,320 feet (400 m). Measuring approximately 3.5 metres (11 ft) from east to west and 4.5 metres (15 ft) from northwest to southeast, the boulder slopes from end to end: the northwestern corner is nearly 1 metre (3 ft 3 in) above the soil, but the southeastern corner gradually meets ground level. Dozens of boulders of Dunkard sandstone, both small and large, are littered around the hilltop; but only two presently bear any sort of human carvings. When the site was first recorded archaeologically, carvings were scattered among several different boulders on the hilltop. At least one such stone has been removed: during the early twentieth century, a group of men masquerading as staff from a museum obtained the second-largest boulder, and it has been lost to science as a result. Smaller rocks were also recorded with petroglyphs, but a 1971 professional survey failed to find anything except on the largest boulder. At that time, it was believed that the other stones may have been stolen, become undistinguishable due to weathering, or simply have become lost among the many similar boulders. Four years later, the second boulder was re-discovered; the previous survey missed it because it had been buried or otherwise obscured.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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