WELCOME to ANGEL MOUNDS

Angel was one of many communities often referred to as Mississippian – a term broadly referring to many diverse communities emerging sometime after A.D. 800 in the Mississippian River Valley who shared ways of doing and seeing things. These included innovations to greatly expand corn agriculture and architectural techniques for building flat-topped earthen mounds. Crushed shell added to clay to make ceramic pottery and a handful of deeply meaningful, symbolic artistic motifs are also part of what defines “Mississippian.” Angel was established by A.D. 1100 and became a major center in the region. By 1450, the city was abandoned and the people established towns and villages elsewhere. Today, we don’t know how the people who lived at Angel referred to their city. We now call it Angel Mounds for the 20th-century farmer who owned the land before it became a protected site.

In historic times, the site was a working farm of the Angel family. In 1938, with a donation from Eli Lilly, the Indiana Historical Society purchased the land to protect it from development. Starting in 1939, under the direction of Glenn A. Black, a crew of 277 WPA workers began excavating the site, recovering more than 2.5 million artifacts. Black’s efforts had a major impact on North American archaeological thought and technique, and at one time, the project was one of the largest of its kind in the United States.