The Mann Site is a very large multicomponent mound and habitation archaeological site located in the "Wabash Lowlands" of Posey County, Indiana. Through the work of Charles Lacer (1978) and several seasons of test excavations by the Glenn A. Black Laboratory under the direction of James H. Kellar, a wealth of information has been obtained about the prehistoric people that archaeologists refer to as the "Middle Woodland Culture". Though materials recovered in the excavations of this site span at least two thousand years of prehistory - from the late Archaic (around 1,000 B.C.) through the early Mississippian (around 1,000 A.D.) culture periods, it is the recovery of spectacular artifacts from the Middle Woodland period (200 B.C. to 500 A.D.) that has made the Mann Site so important to our understanding of Midwestern prehistory.

The Glenn A. Black Laboratory houses artifact collections that we recovered during both surface collections and excavations of the Mann Site conducted in 1964, 1966, 1967, and 1977. Our archaeologists have identified the presence of mounds, earthworks, and living areas distributed over a mile-long area of the site. Of particular interest are the extraordinary ceremonial items, including many that were brought to the site through long-distance trade, including human figurines, ceramics, copper, mica, quartz crystal, exotic flints such as Knife River from the Dakotas, and obsidian and grizzly bear teeth from the Rocky Mountains. The number and diversity of the ceramics found on the site has also been of great importance to archaeologists studying how the techniques and designs used in making both ceremonial and every-day ceramic pieces change with the rise and fall of different prehistoric cultures who inhabited this area of the Ohio Valley.