Setting
The Mississippian farmers found this location by the Ohio River ideal for agricultural purposes, as annual spring floods replenished the nutrients in the soil and allowed cultivation of maize. The fertile soil enabled production of surplus crops, which the Mississippian people used for trade and to support a large enough population to develop artisan and craft specialties. The town, which overlooks the Ohio River, became the center of a regional chiefdom.
The people planned and constructed the town on the third terrace of an earthen mound, above the area flooded on a regular basis, yet close to the fields. A slough surrounds the town on three sides, making it a virtual island, with the river on the fourth side. When the site was first settled, the slough was deeper and the people kept it clear of brush and trees. The community is on top of a terrace looking south across a narrow channel toward Three Mile Island (present-day Kentucky). The slough and island, which existed during the time Angel Mounds was inhabited, created a quiet backwater suitable for using canoes, collecting water, and bathing. Until near the end of the 19th century, the Ohio River was clear and potable.
Read more about this topic: Angel Mounds
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When I consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The supreme, the merciless, the destroyer of opposition, the exalted King, the shepherd, the protector of the quarters of the world, the King the word of whose mouth destroys mountains and seas, who by his lordly attack has forced mighty and merciless Kings from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same to acknowledge one supremacy.”
—Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–59 B.C.)