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.

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.

[2]: 112 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).

Dozens of boulders of Dunkard sandstone, both small and large, are littered around the hilltop;[2]: 29  but only two presently bear any sort of human carvings.

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.

[2]: 32  Similar to carvings at another site that are known as "nut-cracker holes,"[2]: 53  the pits are small indentations that are most likely to have been made individually, although it is possible that they are the sole surviving elements of otherwise eroded designs.

[6]: 9 The earliest published record of the Barnesville Petroglyph was created in 1857 or 1858 by Thomas Kite, and a similar description was produced soon afterward by James W. Ward.