Carl Voegelin spent the summer of 1933 in the field, studying Shawnee language and culture in Oklahoma. He sent technical reports of his work to Sapir, but only a brief summary to Lilly. Then just before Christmas Carl visited at Sunset Lane, along with his wife Erminie W. Voegelin, who would complete a Ph.D. in anthropology at Yale in 1939.

Carl Voegelin came away from that visit impressed with Lilly's depth of knowledge and intensity of interest, for thereafter his letters to Indianapolis were not only more detailed but more academic in tone and content. Voegelin was particularly pleased with Lilly's openness to different methods and subjects. The pre-Christmas visit also enabled Lilly to form a high opinion of Erminie Voegelin so that when her husband was offered other means of financial support Lilly agreed to transfer the Yale fellowship to her.

Lilly's long relationship with the Voegelins was generally pleasant and profitable. There were strains, however. Voegelin had a very high opinion of his abilities, even as a young scholar, and he pushed against Lilly's generosity. In early 1934 he wrote directly to Lilly asking that the fellowship be increased from $1,500 to $2,000. Lilly was furious at Voegelin's cheek but waited several weeks to reply. Noting that he had "handled somewhere between fifty and one hundred fellowships" at other universities he grumped to Voegelin that "fellowships at Yale must come high!" However, "to show that there are no hard feelings," he agreed to increase the fellowship by $250 and then curtly closed debate by stating that "if you and Dr. Sapir do not think this sum is adequate, it will be perfectly satisfactory to have the fellowship dropped." There were difficulties also because Lilly and Black thought Voegelin and Sapir were more interested in ethnology than linguistics and were straying too far from the prehistory of Indiana. After a meeting in Indianapolis in late 1935 to discuss these matters Lilly informed Voegelin that he would not extend the fellowship beyond the original three-year period.

Yet the Voegelin-Lilly relationship did not end, for Voegelin's linquistic strength was an essential element in Lilly's plan of triangulation. In 1936 he agreed to support Voegelin's appointment to the DePauw University faculty, paying his salary of $2,500 a year. And five years later Lilly was a major force in arranging for Voegelin's appointment to the faculty at Indiana University. Thus, with the Voegelins at home in Indiana, Lilly saw them often to talk over questions of prehistory.

The Voegelins were not the only scholars during the 1930s to benefit from Lilly's interest in archaeology or to test his patience. As part of his plan of triangulating on Indiana prehistory, he established fellowships at other universities too, fitting the pattern he had used with Sapir at Yale. Following his interest in tree-ring dating, he set up a fellowship under Fay-Clooper Cole at the University of Chicago, held for a time by Florence Hawley. And at the University of Michigan he established a fellowship to work on pottery, directed by Carl Guthe and held by James B. Griffin, a graduate student at Ann Arbor. Griffin became a longtime archaeology associate of Lilly's and one of the leading scholars in the field. Like Voegelin he was a man of large self-confidence and sometimes a trial to Lilly's patience Another fellowship at Michigan, begun in 1937, supported Georg K. Neumann's study of human skeletal material. Neumann, too, would be a lifelong associate of Lilly's.

Lilly's relationship with Sapir, the Voegelins, Griffin, Neumann, and others showed a large tolerance for diverse interests and personalities. Generously he supported their work, even when he suspected they might be taking advantage of that generosity by following their own interests rather than his. Graciously he tolerated academic caution and procrastination even when he desperately wanted to know the results of a particular inquiry. Gently he rode herd over the professors, commending their work, inviting them to dinner, subsidizing their publications, financing their field work, and contributing to their salaries. All this he did modestly and quietly.

In return Lilly was able to participate fully in his voyage of archaeological discovery, not as a distant patron but as an active pilot and contributor. The idea for a triangulated attack on the problem of time was his, and it was he who kept pushing and nudging the Indiana group, as they came to be called. He served as coordinator, making sure that reports, correspondence, and references circulated. He organized periodic meetings at Sunset Lane and at Wawasee. When Guthe and Griffin came down from Ann Arbor he invited the others to Sunset Lane for the weekend. They "went into a huddle early Friday evening and discontinued only for food and a little sleep until Sunday morning." In 1937 he began to call an annual meeting at his Wawasee cottage, usually a weekend in October, where the group would compare notes of the year's work. Usually invited to the lake were Guthe, Griffin, Black, Guernsey, Carl Voegelin, Weer, and Neumann. Those in or near Indianapolis would leave from Sunset Lane, piling into Ruth's Cadillac for the journey to the lake. Lilly sometimes encouraged each member to come with three small projects "in which you think our Wawasee group would be interested." As a result of these conferences, Guthe wrote in 1937, "each member of the group is beginning to understand more clearly where his jot fits into the general scheme."

The breadth of Lilly's interest in archaeology allowed room also for very sustained attention to one specific prehistoric site. He had visited Angel Mounds on the trip with Moorehead in 1931. Moorehead told him that "it is the most important place archaeologically in your state" and suggested that Lilly buy the site in order to preserve it from the effects of continued farming and the encroachment of Evansville's population.

Lilly visited Angel Mounds again in 1935 and devoted several pages of his Prehistoric Antiquities of Indiana to describing the site, located on the Ohio, upriver from Evansville and just west of Newburgh. He noted the several large man-made mounds, particularly the central mound (Mound A), which he measured as 520 feet long at the base and 30 feet high, with a flat top that was 100 by 200 feet. He commented on potsherds, bones, chipped flints, human burials, and the high stockade that once protected the site from enemies. "What would we not give to reverse the film of prehistory to a view of the teeming life within this village, its boisterous play, sweat-producing work, revered ceremonies, bloody wars, and the general way of living?" There was no other site like this one in Indiana, yet no serious archaeological work had been undertaken. "Why do we sit idly by, letting these precious chances slip through our fingers?" It was time to act. "Here, baked in the glaring summer sun, frozen under winter snows, gradually wasting away under the plow and the harrow, is a site that the State of Indiana should rescue from oblivion, and so save to posterity another of our pre-Columbian heritages."

Angel site was indeed worthy of preservation. But in the depths of the Depression the state of Indiana was an unlikely candidate for assuming the responsibility. Nor were private contributors in the Evansville area forthcoming, despite the efforts at persuasion by Black and Lilly. As would happen so often when other means proved unavailable for a good cause, Lilly provided the necessary support. In 1938, acting again under cover of the Indiana Historical Society, he provided $68,000 of the $71,957 necessary to buy the 435-acre site. Black took primary charge of the project and in spring, 1939, moved to a house on the site and began to supervise the newly arrived workers. Nearly all the men who did the surveying, digging, and cataloging at Angel site from the beginning in 1939 until work stopped in May, 1942, were unemployed casualties of the Depression, their wages paid by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Lilly and Black were staunch Republicans, vehemently opposed to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. But, after some initial reluctance, they decided that "we are crazy for not getting some of that easy money back that we are all paying out."

In May, 1939, Lilly made his first visit to Black's home at Angel site and returned in September, writing Black "When I go on W.P.A. will you give me a job?" Though Lilly seldom if ever picked up a trowel or shovel, he was very closely involved with the work. He and Ruth often visited Glenn and Ida Black at their Newburgh home. And letters between Indianapolis and Angel site were detailed and frequent, with Black reporting each new discovery and the two of them exchanging ideas and references to the literature and speculating on the cultural meaning of the particular artifact or burial. Both men were particularly excited by the discovery in November, 1940, of a fluorite figurine, carved in the likeness of an adult male. Lilly had special photographs made of their "Apollo a la Newburgh," as he called it. Their correspondence reached to the smallest detail, such as the question of repairing or replacing the office typewriter. Because Lilly's money was paying Black's salary and many other costs not covered by WPA, Black carefully checked with him on expenditures. Black was very frugal and most resourceful in keeping costs reasonable, and Lilly always approved his requests, sometimes encouraging more spending.

While Lilly derived large pleasure from Angel Mounds, he continued to seek ways to remove it from his and the Historical Society's responsibility In 1941, he and Black approached Indiana University President Herman B Wells, who showed keen interest but could not offer financial support. As the Depression waned, state aid seemed more promising. In 1941 Lilly lunched with Richard Lieber, the founder of Indiana's state park system, to encourage support for state purchase of the site and reconstruction of a prehistoric village. As the war wound down and a Republican returned to the governor's office, Lilly made a direct assault on the statehouse. In June, 1945, he had dinner with Governor Ralph Gates and pushed hard for state purchase of Angel site. As a result of Lilly's prodding, Gates visited the site two weeks later, after which Black happily reported that "things do seem to be going the way we want them."

For a short time they did. The state took title to the property in December, 1946, but the conservation department, which was to administer it, failed to maintain and develop the site as promised. Indeed, in late 1945 Howard Peckham, the newly appointed director of the Society, telephoned Lilly to report that "the whole Conservation Commission has practically blown up, all the good men out and the politicians in full sway. " The swing of Indiana's exceptionally sharp patronage ax had cut through the department, and the new party faithful- "the boys in the Claypool Hotel" - had received their rewards. Lilly forlornly concluded that they would have no choice but to try "to operate in a friendly fashion with the new banditti."

The experience thereafter was "almost disastrous." Lilly and Black pushed for development of the site and construction of an interpretive center or museum, but without result. "No one [from state government] has ever visited the Mounds," Lilly grumbled in 1963, "in spite of hospitable invitations from time to time, and they have not at all fulfilled the agreement that the State has made." The state conservation department, Lilly wrote in his reminiscences, "was mainly interested in employing as many fish and game wardens as possible for political purposes."

The shortcomings of a patronage-oriented state government did not prevent beneficial use of Angel site. The Society retained the right to continue archaeological works and in 1945 agreed to join Indiana University in conducting a summer archaeological field school there under Black's direction. From 1945 to 1962 a total of more than one hundred students spent a summer at the site, learning field techniques from Black and extending the work done by their WPA predecessors.