Angel Phase
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The Angel Phase is an archaeological cultural manifestation of the Mississippian culture of the central portions of the United States of America. Angel Phase archaeological sites date from c1050 - 1350 CE and are located on the northern side of the Ohio River in southern Indiana. Sites extend from the mouth of Anderson Creek in Perry County, Indiana to the mouth of the Wabash in Posey County, Indiana.
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[edit] Angel assemblage
One of the most extensive Mississippian artifact assemblages in its region, the Angel collection consists of well over 2.5 million individually catalogued objects and the count is rising yearly with continued excavation and research. Characteristic to Angel mounds in particular, the assemblage is overwhelmingly ceramic with vessels and pottery fragments occupying just under 70% of the total count, or more than 1.8 million sherds. (Hilgeman,2000:25). Of this vast quantity, 98% are plain or decorated with relatively common designs, although it is of worth to note that these common decorations such as cord marking and fabric impressing are themselves very rare.
Chipped stone artifacts and debris are fairly uncommon at Angel, consisting of less than 1% of all artifacts, and ground stone artifacts represent circa one seventh the frequency of their chipped counterparts. Faunal remains are, however, a significant portion of the assemblage, with specimen counts attributing about 20%. From a regional perspective, Hilgeman states that certain patterns and comparisons can be observed between other assemblages and among time periods. First, the plainness of the Angel collection is similar to comparable assemblages from the Tennessee-Cumberland region, but is considered more plain than other Ohio-Mississippi confluence assemblages.[1] Second, there is a trend toward greater plainness as time progresses. From early Angel 2 phase to late Angel 3 phase, the percentage of decorated sherds relative to all sherds declined from 3% to 0.6%. This trend is in concurrence with regional trends in Tennessee-Cumberland and Western Kentucky assemblages that deemphasized painting as a mode of decoration from prior to 1200 CE compared to afterward.
[edit] Styles
[edit] Artifact seriation
The chronology of Angel pottery is based upon certain markers that occur in the assemblage.[2] These markers are chosen because they either seemingly follow a continuous change over time, or are absent/present in a stratigraphic level base on the time of maximum usage. Rim thickness and handle variation are the markers that gradually shift in styles over time and can be associated with the general early period with the loop handle shifting toward the strap handle later. Whereas the appearance of a Ramey Incised sherd demarcates an earlier period, and the appearance of a Parkin Punctuated sherd indicates a later period.
The context in which these artifact markers are found contributes to whether the chronology can be deemed viable and acceptable as a temporal scale. To ensure that this is true, a series of eliminations of the questionable layers where the analyzed sherds originated from is conducted to create a sample that represents undisturbed archaeological stratigraphy.
[edit] Spatiotemporal distribution
In the lower Ohio valley, the Mississippian towns of Kincaid, Wickliffe, Tolu, and Angel have been grouped together into a "Kincaid Focus" set due to similarities in pottery assemblages but also for other reasons.(See Wickliffe Mounds and Angel Mounds.) Even more striking are the comparisons between Kincaid and Angel sites which include analogous site plans, stylistic similarities in all artifacts, and geographic closeness. These connections have led some experts to hypothesize that they were of the same society.[3] The three to four hundred years that these types of artifacts and sites are found in is called the “Angel Phase” which is roughly broken up into three subphases: Jonathan Creek (1000/1100-1200CE), Angelly (1200-1300CE), and Tinsley Hill (1300-1450CE) (30). All four areas include painted and incised sherds that are very rare, ranging from less than one percent near Kincaid to about three or four percent of the assemblage at Wickliffe. Some common pottery styles found in these sites include: Angel Negative Painted, Kincaid Negative Painted, and Matthews Incised (32). This pottery is shell tempered and ranges from a smoothed surface and coarser temper - Mississippi Ware - to a more polished surface and finer temper - Bell Ware (31).
[edit] Regional Manifestations
[edit] Chronology
Hilgeman compares the placement of occupation with the time periods of the Angel site. A good amount of the structures in the site were built in the early Angel 2 phase (1200 to 1325), which according to the stratigraphy of midden deposits, was the earliest Middle Mississippian occupation of Angel. During this phase at Angel, pottery design indicates that this was the same time period that Middle Wickliffe transitioned to Late Wickliffe phase, as well as Angelly. There is a proposed Angel 1 phase (Stephan-Steinkamp Phase, 1100 to 1200?), which is only represented by pottery sherds in the vicinity of, but not in the Angel Mounds site. Hilgeman explains that Mound A was constructed in the early 13th century, during the Angel 2 phase. The pottery found at the top of the mound date to only Angel 2. This suggests that the mound was no longer in use for Angel 3 (1325 to 1450).[4]. Kincaid’s largest platform mound which is similar to Mound A, MX10, was also only used up until around 1300. According to pottery deposits throughout the site, only half of the area was occupied for Angel 2. The dating of human remains buried at the site and Angel 3 pottery suggest that the majority of the site (north, west, east, and interior areas) was in use during Angel 3. So there was much more activity and a larger occupation during Angel 3 than during Angel 2.[5].
[edit] History of research
The history of research concerning Angel Phase and Mississippian archaeology is mainly focused on the progress of study on shell tempered pottery. The first accounts of the process of shell tempered pottery are described by Dumont in the Southeast. In this historical account Dumont describes how women were in charge of the process and describes in rich detail the skill and elements involved in the creation of shell temper pottery. Pottery has been used in this region for both chronological purposes and to understand cultural relationships. “Fay-Cooper Cole et al. (1951:229) grouped the lower Ohio Valley Mississippian towns of Angel, Kincaid, Tolu and Wickliffe into the “Kincaid focus”.”[6] As the discipline of archaeology changed the focus of research in Mississippian archaeology changed with it. Chronology by seriation became an essential step towards answering more complex questions instead of being only the final result of a study. “The second major change in Mississippian studies is that pottery analysis is addressing new questions – compositional, technological, functional and stylistic…”[7] Hilgeman describes several examples of compositional studies like the first thin section analyses conducted by Porter; microscopic examination of paste and temper in order to identify non local vessels and further improve the classification of sherds; and more recent studies focused on resources and exchange patterns.
Some of the breakthroughs described by Hilgeman in Mississippian archaeology technology studies include detail information on manufacture of pottery by Million and van der Leeuw; the fact that sodium chloride improves the workability of shell tempered clay by Stimmel; and several studies conducted by Steponaitis, Bronitsky and Hamer in which the resistance of fine shell tempered versus coarse shell tempered pottery to thermal and mechanical stresses was put to the test. Functional studies described by Hilgeman include the difference between ceremonial pottery and utilitarian pottery by Sears and Childress; “Smith noted that a number of innovations in pottery technology are associated with the cultivation, storage, processing and preparation of maize”[8]
