Painted Bluff is a cliff overlooking the Tennessee River in Marshall County, Alabama that features over 130 individual prehistoric Native American pictographs and petroglyphs.

Painted Bluff is located about 4 miles (6.4 km) downstream from the Guntersville Dam and is only accessible by boat.

Due to the humid environment, open-air rock art sites are rare in the Southeastern United States.

[4] TVA archaeologist Erin Pritchard considers Painted bluff to be "one of, if not the, most significant open-air rock art occurrence[s]" in the region.

The carboniferous limestone that comprises the bluff formed between 359 and 323 million years ago, predating the formation of the North American contentment.

[8] The first written references to Painted Bluff are from the nineteenth-century jurist and historian John Haywood in his 1823 book The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee.

Haywood moved to Nashville, Tennessee from his home state of North Carolina in 1807 and became fascinated by the prehistoric artifacts and monuments in the region.

These motifs are: circles, lines and curves, boxes and rectangles, patches or swatches, maces, fish, birds, quadrupeds or mammals, anthropomorphs, and others.

[14] The most common motif found in the rock art of Painted Bluff is circular shapes.

[12] Circles filled with crosses, or "cross-in-circle(s)", are a common Native American religious icon from the Mississippian Period.

[16] The second most common motif found in the rock art of Painted Bluff is linear forms.

They discovered that both natural weathering and human activities were damaging the rock art and the site.

[35][36] The following organizations and Native American tribes are involved with the preservation efforts at Painted Bluff:[37]