Angel Mounds State Historic Site
Near Evansville, Indiana, United States
A Middle Mississippian town on the Ohio River, occupied from about 1100 to 1450 CE, with thirteen earthen mounds, a stockaded village, and a recently reworked interpretive center built in consultation with tribes whose ancestors lived there.
Angel Mounds preserves one of the best-documented Mississippian towns north of the Gulf states. At its height between roughly 1100 and 1450 CE, archaeologists estimate the walled community held as many as 1,000 people and served as the political and trading center of a chiefdom stretching along the Ohio River valley as far as the Green River in Kentucky. Six large platform mounds and five smaller ones rise from the terraced ground above the river; Mound A, the largest, stands 44 feet high and was built from some 67,000 cubic yards of earth carried basket by basket, likely supporting the residence of the hereditary chief. A reconstructed section of the 12-foot palisade with defensive bastions shows how seriously the town took its defenses. The site was abandoned before European contact, for reasons scholars connect to drought, resource strain, and regional movement, and a later culture, the Caborn-Welborn phase, emerged downriver.
The site's modern history is layered. The name comes from the Angel family, who farmed the land from 1852; in 1938 the Indiana Historical Society, funded by Eli Lilly, bought 480 acres to save the mounds from a levee project, and Works Progress Administration crews under archaeologist Glenn A. Black excavated here from 1939 to 1942, recording 2.3 million artifacts. Indiana University field schools have returned every summer since 1945. The interpretive center closed in 2022 and reopened in 2024 after a $6.5 million renovation carried out in collaboration with the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, the Osage Nation, the Quapaw Nation, the Shawnee, and other tribes, and the Indiana State Museum manages the site today. It is a National Historic Landmark.
Visiting
Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites operates the site near Evansville: interpretive center open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm; self-guided outdoor mound tours and trails 10 am to 4:30 pm. Admission: adults $13, seniors (60+) $11, youth $9; children under 3 free; free admission days on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents Day, and Juneteenth. Closed Easter, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
Photo: [CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mound_A_from_Mound_C_at_the_Angel_Mounds_State_Historic_Site.jpg)
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories