Yankeetown Archeological Site

About this property

The Yankeetown Site (12W1) is a substantial archaeological site along the Ohio River in the southwestern part of the U.S. state of Indiana. Inhabited during the prehistoric Woodland period, the site has yielded important information about Woodland-era peoples in the region, but it has been damaged by substantial erosion. Despite the damage, it has been a historic site for more than thirty years. Yankeetown lies primarily in Section 21 of Anderson Township in Warrick County. Because of the presence of the Ohio River, this section is a tiny riverside triangle, unlike the mile-square sections to the east and north. The present-day unincorporated community of Yankeetown lies approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) north of the site; a road runs from the town to the riverside, and the road/river junction marks one end of the site's core section. This section extends along the riverbank for about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) downstream from the road, The riverbank core of the site has experienced extensive damage from erosion by the river: in 1950, landowners along the river stated that approximately 20 feet (6.1 m) of the bank were cut away annually. Glenn Albert Black visited Yankeetown in April 1950 with three companions; the four surveyed the site carefully and began cataloging artifacts found there. Heavy erosion permitted them to identify features such as pits and hearths, and artifacts such as clay pellets and bits of charcoal and burned clay were numerous. Four months later, a second survey investigated the site. Among its premier findings was the identification of a layer of daub about 8 inches (200 mm) below the surface at the site's low end; although it was only 10 feet (3.0 m) long, the layer was significant for its composition of burned debris, grass, and weeds, as well as for its place as the location of a depression that could have been the site of a house. Many artifacts found at Yankeetown are curated in the museum at Angel Mounds State Memorial in nearby Evansville, although the second 1950 survey kept its findings separate from those at Angel, and the landowner maintained a substantial collection. More than six thousand sherds from Yankeetown are curated at Angel; the majority of those known in 1950 were tempered with clay and/or grit, although six hundred bore evidence of shell tempering, and only about five hundred lacked evidence of a tempering agent. Meanwhile, large numbers of the sherds are plain; hundreds have been found marked with cords or incisions, but approximately 64% of the pottery known in 1950 was completely undecorated. Rarer items found at Yankeetown include flint knives, hammerstones, trowels, lithic flakes, bones, objects of cannel coal, and two damaged pottery effigies of women with everything below the shoulders broken off.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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