Angel Mounds State Historic Site (12 VG 1), an expression of the Mississippian culture, is an archaeological site managed by the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites that includes more than of land about southeast of present-day Evansville, in Vanderburgh and Warrick counties in Indiana. The large residential and agricultural community was constructed and inhabited from AD 1100 to AD 1450, and served as the political, cultural, and economic center of the Angel chiefdom. It extended within of the Ohio River valley to the Green River in present-day Kentucky. The town had as many as 1,000 inhabitants inside the walls at its peak, and included a complex of thirteen earthen mounds, hundreds of home sites, a palisade (stockade), and other structures.
Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964, the property also includes an interpretive center, recreations of Mississippian structures, a replica of a 1939 Works Projects Administration archaeology laboratory, and a area away from the archaeological site that is a nature preserve. The historic site continues to preserve and relate the story of pre-contact Middle Mississippian indigenous culture on the Ohio River.
The site is named after the Angel family, who in 1852 began purchasing the farmland on which the archaeological site is located. In 1938, the Indiana Historical Society, with funding from Eli Lilly, purchased of property to preserve it and to use it for long-term archaeological research. From 1939 to 1942, the Works Progress Administration employed more than 250 workers to excavate of the site, which resulted in the recording and processing of 2.3 million archaeological items. After excavation was temporarily halted during World War II, work resumed in 1945 as part of the Indiana University Archaeology Field School during the summer months. In 1946, the Indiana Historical Society transferred ownership of the site to the State of Indiana. It manages the site through the Indiana State Museum. Archaeological research on Angel Mounds, once conducted through the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, is now overseen by the IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington.
History
Origins
For thousands of years, the area that was later organized as the eastern United States was home to a succession of native groups who settled near the rivers and used them for travel and trade. The widespread Mississippian culture, which is named in reference to its geographical origins along the Mississippi River valley and its tributaries, developed around AD 900. This culture eventually extended as far west as Oklahoma, as far north as the present-day suburbs of Saint Louis, Missouri, in southwestern Illinois, and ranging east into the Southeastern Woodlands, to present-day North Carolina and as far south as present-day Mississippi.
Site development and decline
The people of the Middle Mississippian culture built and lived in a community (in what became southwestern Indiana around AD 1100 and remained there until AD 1450, a period that Marjory Honerkamp defined in the 1970s as the Angel phase. The Angel phase and the Mississippian culture town are named after the Angel family, who in 1852 began purchasing farmland that included the archaeological site.
Archeologist Sherri Hilgeman and others have used the distinctive pottery produced at the Angel site and in other satellite communities in this section of the Ohio River valley to define the Angel phase as the middle period between the Emergent Mississippian Yankeetown phase (AD 750 to AD 1000) and the Terminal Mississippian Caborn-Wellborn phase (AD 1400 to AD 1700).
The Angel chiefdom (a simple hierarchy led by a chief) was the regional trading center in a group of communities within of the Ohio River valley; it extended as far as the Green River in present-day Kentucky. The large residential and agricultural community was also the political, cultural, and economic center of the chiefdom, whose residents traded with other chiefdoms and peoples along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The Angel community primarily inhabited an area bounded by the Ohio River to the south, the White River and its East Fork to the north, the Wabash River to the west, and the Anderson River to the east. Archaeologists have inferred that the smaller communities (villages, hamlets, farmsteads and camp sites) were politically subordinate to the main Angel site. Continuing excavations at the site have revealed new elements of the complex society.