Track Rock Gap is one of Georgia’s best-known petroglyph sites, with six table-sized soapstone boulders bearing hundreds of symbols carved or pecked into their surfaces. Archaeologists have speculated that the figures date anywhere from the Archaic Period, 8,000 to 1,000 B.C., to the Cherokee Indians who lived here until the 19th Century. The exact meaning of the symbols and glyphs is unknown, though they represent animals, birds, tracks, and geometric figures. The earliest written account, in 1834, was by Dr. Matthew Stephenson, director of the U.S. Branch Mint in Dahlonega. Ethnographer James Mooney recorded one of the favorite stories about the site while gathering Cherokee stories. The Cherokee called the place Datsu’nalasgun’ylu, where there are tracks, and Degayelun’ha, the printed or branded place. Cherokee stories say that hunters paused in the gap and amused themselves by carving the glyphs, that the marks were made during a great hunt when animals were driven through the gap, and that the tracks were made when the animals were leaving the great canoe after a flood nearly destroyed the world while the earth and rocks were soft.