Lecture Delivered at Angel Mounds National Historic Landmark Evansville, Indiana On 1 April 1987

"The importance of Mr. Lilly's contributions to Indiana archaeology and history cannot be estimated," concluded Gayle Thornbrough, executive secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, when she summed up Lilly's life in 1977. Two of the legendary Indianapolis businessman's avocations-archaeology and history-build upon chronology. The order which Lilly turned his mind to them is significant. His serious interest in archaeology predated his productive years as a historian. Miss Thornbrough bore this out in her brief Eli Lilly: Archaeologist and Historian, 1885-1977 (1977).

The following pages trace Lilly's maturing interest in prehistoric archaeology from the days when he bought items from "pot hunters," through the years when he assimilated the existing scholarship on Indiana and Midwest archaeology, and then moved ahead to formulate, mastermind, and underwrite an exemplary research and excavation program for his native state. The Indiana University's Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology is the lengthened shadow of the warm (but unlikely) friendship that bonded Lilly and Black while that program developed. This piece therefore appropriately comes to the public through the auspices of the laboratory and its current director, Dr. Christopher S. Peebles.

Professor James H. Madison does justice to the fascinating human elements of his story. He documents how Lilly grew remarkably in the second half of his life to use his considerable mental and material resources beyond the family pharmaceutical company and beyond personal indulgence. Lilly's passion for archaeology had a public purpose. The same can be said of his later passion for history and for some of his other interests. "Eli Lilly: Archaeologist" will whet the readers' appetites for the full-scale biography which Madison is preparing for publication by the Indiana Historical Society.

Peter T. Harstad
Executive Director
Indiana Historical Society