A City Lost For Centuries Was Uncovered By Archaeologists in Rural Kansas
David Kelly/The Los Angeles TimesAnthropologist and archaeology professor Donald Blakeslee in one of the pits being excavated in Arkansas City, Kansas.[/caption]
Archaeology news hit an absolute goldmine in a relatively unlikely place: in the Great Plains of Kansas. Here, a sprawling, centuries-old lost city was discovered.
A few years ago, Donald Blakeslee, an anthropologist and archaeology professor at Wichita State University, discovered the lost city of Etzanoa, located in present-day Arkansas City, Kansas. Locals in this small town in south-central Kansas had been finding arrowheads, pottery, and other ancient artifacts in the area’s fields and rivers for decades, but no one ever knew the full extent of the archaeological gold mine hidden underneath their town.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Blakeslee used newly translated documents written by the Spanish conquistadors who came across the land over 400 years ago to determine that these artifacts were once part of the Native American lost city of Etzanoa.
“‘I thought, ‘Wow, their eyewitness descriptions are so clear it’s like you were there,'” Blakeslee told the Times about reading the conquistador’s accounts. “I wanted to see if the archaeology fit their descriptions. Every single detail matched this place.”
David Kelly/The Los Angeles TimesRussell Bishop, a former Arkansas City resident, shows off the arrowheads he found in the area as a kid.
The city of Etzanoa is believed to have been around from 1450 to 1700 and was home to approximately 20,000 people. Blakeslee said that the city was the second-largest settlement in the present-day United States at the time and spanned across at least five miles of the space between the Walnut and Arkansas rivers.
The 20,000 inhabitants of Etzanoa were said to have lived in “thatched, beehive-shaped houses.” Locals in the area had been uncovering artifacts from the lost city for decades but didn’t understand why until evidence of the city itself was discovered by Blakeslee.
“Lots of artifacts have been taken from here,” Warren “Hap” McLeod, a resident of Arkansas City who lives on the spot where the battle took place, told the Times. “Now we know why. There were 20,000 people living here for over 200 years.”
