Angel Mounds

Six hundred acres of Mississippian town, lived in for 350 years

On the north bank of the Ohio River, about eight miles south-east of Evansville, Indiana, stood the largest known town of its time in what is now Indiana. Nobody knows what its people called it. It carries the name of the Angel family, who began buying the farmland in 1852.

The town grew up around AD 1100 as the capital of a Mississippian chiefdom whose villages, hamlets and farmsteads reached along the Ohio valley as far as the Green River in Kentucky, and by 1250 it was a powerful city. It faced south across a narrow channel to what is now Three Mile Island, and the quiet backwater slough curling around it gave canoes easy passage, fish and clean water, while every spring flood renewed the soil for maize, beans and squash. At its height perhaps 1,000 people, around 200 households, lived behind a 12-foot palisade of wattle and daub punctuated by bastions, around a plaza and eleven earthen mounds. The biggest, Mound A, rises 44 feet in three levels on a base 644 feet long, and labourers carried its 67,785 cubic yards of earth in baskets. The mounds were aligned with remarkable precision, the museum that runs the site says, on sunrise at the summer solstice and sunset at the winter solstice.

By 1450 the city was empty. The reasons are uncertain. Drought that cut the maize surplus, overhunting, and forests stripped for timber and firewood are all suspects, and many of the people seem to have moved downriver to where the Wabash meets the Ohio. They had gone long before any European arrived.

The site survived because Eli Lilly paid for it. In 1938, with a planned levee and real estate development threatening the mounds, the Indiana Historical Society bought 480 acres with his money. From 1939 to 1942 Glenn A. Black, who moved into a house on the grounds, directed 277 WPA workers across 120,000 square feet, and they recovered more than two million artifacts. Later Black traced the buried palisade lines with a proton magnetometer, one of the first comprehensive tests of the instrument in the Americas, and he was nearly finished with his Angel report when he died in 1964. Indiana University's summer field school has dug here since 1945.

Angel Mounds became a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and is now run by the Indiana State Museum. Its interpretive centre reopened in 2024 after a $6.5 million overhaul made in collaboration with the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, the Osage Nation, the Quapaw Nation, the Shawnee and others, and the place remains sacred to today's tribal nations.