Angel Mounds Collections

Angel Mounds

What is Angel Mounds?

Located near the Ohio River in Vanderburgh County, Indiana, the Angel Mounds site (12Vg1) was the residence of a Mississippian community between A.D. 1050 and 1450.

Angel Mounds as regional center included numerous mounds, palisades that surrounded portions of the site, and hundreds of individual structures. The site was eventually abandoned after about 300 years of occupation. The reasons are not well-understood although it is commonly believed to be due to exhaustion of local resources, climate change, and/or internal social stress.

Today, the Angel Mounds State Historic Site still occupies an impressive 600 acres that includes reconstructed buildings and features, a laboratory, and an interpretive center. Angel Mounds State Historic Site is open and accessible to the public.

Angel Mounds State Historic Site

Explore the history of the site!

Indiana State Museum website

Angel on Exhibition

We're planning an exhibition on Angel Mounds in collaboration with Native partners, coming May 2025. In the meantime, check our other upcoming exhibitions!

Upcoming Exhibitions

Angel Mounds at IUMAA

The Angel Mounds collections represent the IUMAA's largest archaeology collection, amounting to over 2.5 million artifacts. Excavations at Angel Mounds began in 1939 with Glenn Black supervising WPA works at the site. The excavation tradition continued from the 1940s to the present with Indiana University field schools resulting in a rich collection of artifacts and associated records that have long guided archaeological research on Mississippian culture. Research at the site and with the Angel collections is ongoing and the significance of the Angel Mounds site continues to be defined as more analyses are conducted.

Excavation diary and images (S1542, S1543) of F2/X7D.
Image Collections
A significant portion of the Archaeology Historic Image Collection chronicles the history of excavations at Angel Mounds Site. From the early days of excavation during the Works Progress Administration (WPA) project, the collection documents over 75 years of work at Angel Mounds.
Angel Mounds Images
Click the link to glimpse some of that history!
Digital Collections

More about WPA Angel Mounds

Want to hear more?

IUMAA Librarian talks about "1939 Angel Mounds" in this Coffee & Curators talk presented summer 2022:

YouTube video

Resources

Angel Mounds State Historic Site. Indiana State Museum: Evansville, IN.

Black, G. Angel Site: An archaeological, historical, and ethnological study. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1967.

Friberg, C., Pope, M., Sievert, A., St. Germain, J., Grimm, K., & Herrmann, E.W. (2020). Creation of Knowledge and Curation of Legacy: Preserving Angel Mounds Collections and Data. The SAA Archeological Record The Magazine of the Society for American Archaeology, 20(3), 20. Digital Edition.

Hilgeman, S. L. Pottery and Chronology at Angel. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000.