I visited a few southern Indiana mounds last Friday. Taking the last visit first, I went to the Angel Mounds site in Evansville. I highly recommend it if you’re in the area. The indoor museum was recently renovated and the videos are all well done. I recommend that you visit outside of school hours (the place gets a lot of field trips) since it allows you to walk the grounds in peace and imagine the lives of the people. I won’t post any pictures because none of mine are as good as you can find on the site linked above.
Angel Mounds is the site of a Native American settlement on the banks of the Ohio River; at its height there could have been a thousand people living there. It was abandoned in 1450 for reasons that are unclear. The mounds are man-made and, in this case, are structural—to elevate certain buildings. They are not generally burial mounds, as the others I visited that day.
Sugar Loaf Mound in Vincennes was well maintained. A sign gives a phone number you can call for an audio tour. View of the mound from two angles:
And a welcome reminder that this is a sacred site:
Both Sugar Loaf and Pyramid Mounds appear to be natural (not man-made) mounds that were subsequently used as burial sites. Both are near the Wabash River.
Pyramid Mound was a little harder to find using the maps app. I recommend inputting the coordinates from this site into your maps app and then navigating your own way there. The turn by turn directions will lead you wrong.
This site was frankly a bit depressing. It is feet from a heavily used highway and was almost destroyed by that road’s construction. Thankfully they noticed in time that it wasn’t just a normal hill. It’s also very close to a noisy granary. There are piles of brush everywhere, maybe left over from the time when the road was built? In short, it was clearly neglected and had none of the peace of the other sites. It was a stark reminder of both past and present violence against Native American sacred sites.
