Evidence for Ridge and Furrow Agriculture at Angel Mounds in Southern Indiana

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Evidence of agriculture during the Mississippian period in the Midwest derives largely from the identification and analysis of cultivar macrobotanicals from refuse contexts. However, research that investigates how and where crops were grown on Midwestern sites is scant. As a result, few sites have been identified that document farming fields, garden beds, or family plots where cultigens were grown. In this paper, we document remnants of a probable ridge and furrow agricultural system used at Angel Mounds (12Vg1) in present-day southern Indiana. Angel Mounds was a large regional Mississippian (AD 1100–1450) center in a network of sites in the lower Ohio Valley region. Although the site has been examined carefully and archaeobotanical analysis has identified a number of cultigens from various contexts, the location, type, and age of agricultural fields or garden plots have not been previously investigated. Excavations by Indiana University and Algonquin Associates in 2020 recovered the first potential evidence of farming practices in the region, suggesting that farmers grew maize, beans, gourds, and other crops outside of the palisaded, civic-ceremonial portions of the site. The broader implication of our work is that these features are easy to overlook using traditional geophysical and excavation techniques.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36591.0