Indigenous Resilience in Uncertain Times: Integrating Community and Maintaining Relationships at Angel Mounds

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Mississippian cultural phenomenon (1050–1450 CE) is marked by the near sudden emergence of population centers with regional networks along the Mississippi River and its tributary valleys in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. These societies seem to have declined as quickly as they emerged, beginning around the transition from the Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age around 1200 CE, which resulted in prolonged and unpredictable periods of drought and coincided with an increase in warfare throughout the Mississippian world. However, far from collapsing, resilient peoples created strategies for coping with warfare and climate change from shifting subsistence strategies, to building protective palisade walls, and the reorganization of communities in increasingly constricted spaces. For over 200 years, people of Angel Mounds (12Vg1)—a fortified Mississippian (1150-1450) multi-mound center located in Evansville, Indiana—maintained exchange relationships with other Mississippian groups in addition to continuing to build and maintain mounds and plazas that served to integrate the community early on. This paper investigates the ways in which the Angel Mounds community coped with a changing climate and endemic warfare through a GIS spatial analysis of architecture, excavation data, and remote sensing survey at the site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53722