Emily Chan
On the Great Plains of Kansas, a groundbreaking discovery was made of a lost city that is hundreds of years old.
A few years ago, an anthropologist and an archaeology professor from Wichita State University named Donald Blakeslee found the lost city of Etzanoa. It was located in what is now known as Arkansas City, Kansas.
For decades, locals in the area had been finding pottery, arrowheads, and other artifacts in rivers and fields, but they never thought that a whole city might be buried underneath their small town.
After using 400-year-old documents from Spanish conquistadors that were recently translated, Blakeslee learned that the artifacts belonged to the Native American city of Etzanoa.
It is believed that Etzanoa was around from 1450 to 1700. The city was home to roughly 20,000 people.
According to Blakeslee, Etzanoa was the second largest settlement in the region that is called the United States today. It stretched across at least five miles of space between the Walnut and Arkansas rivers.
Based on the observations of the Spanish conquistadors, the inhabitants of the city lived in “thatched, beehive-shaped houses.”
The conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado arrived at the town in 1541, hoping to discover the gold that was said to be buried there. Instead, he found Native Americans living in a cluster of settlements he named Quivira.
Then, 60 years later, in 1601, Juan de Oñate led 70 conquistadors on a search for gold from New Mexico to Quivira. Along the way, they encountered a tribe called the Escanxaques. The tribe told them about Etzanoa.
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