For thousands of years, people kept coming back to the same cave in northeastern Alabama. Russell Cave holds an almost continuous archeological record from at least 9000 B.C.E. to about 1650 C.E., including one of the oldest burials known in Alabama and some of the oldest bone tools, fishhooks, domesticated seeds and weaving impressions in the Southeast. What made it such a good home was its geology.
Blocks of Mississippian limestone form the edges of a flooded sinkhole. Image from the National Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory.
The monument
Russell Cave National Monument lies on the northeastern flank of Montague Mountain in Jackson County, Alabama. Proclaimed on May 11, 1961, it covers about 125 hectares (310 acres). The cave itself is a shelter of about 929 square meters (10,000 square feet), whose combination of geological features, water and natural resources made an ideal place to live for millennia — and the monument preserves many sites tied to its use and occupation by Indigenous peoples.
Dissolved from ancient seas
The monument sits on the Cumberland Plateau, a region of Paleozoic sedimentary rock with modest relief, part of the Appalachian Plateaus physiographic province.
| Age | Rock | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Mississippian (oldest) | Shale and fossil-rich limestone of the Monteagle Limestone, Bangor Limestone and Pennington Formation | The rock the cave formed in |
| Pennsylvanian | Pottsville Formation: tough conglomerate and sandstone with coal layers | Forms ridges and caps Montague Mountain in the southwest of the monument |
| Quaternary (youngest) | Terrace and alluvial fan deposits, alluvium, thin colluvium | Surface deposits |
Over millions of years, groundwater seeping through the Mississippian carbonate rocks dissolved them and hollowed out Russell Cave. The same process created other karst features common around the monument: swallets, where streams disappear underground; sinkholes; karst windows; and springs.
Maps and inventories
The Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory, which produces digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks, has a geologic map and report for Russell Cave, and a Soil Resources Inventory has been completed; both are on the NPS DataStore.
Sources
Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Russell Cave National Monument, Alabama," National Park Service Geologic Resources Inventory, which cites National Park Service (2014, 2016) and Thornberry-Ehrlich (2014); a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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