A Lost City That’s Hundreds Of Years Old And Was Once Home To About 20,000 People Is Buried Beneath A Small Town In Kansas
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.
Max Maximov – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
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When the conquistadors reached Etzanoa, they began taking hostages, causing the city’s residents to flee.
They explored the area for a while but decided to return home in case the people they uprooted from their homes launched an attack on them.
As they made the trek back to New Mexico, over 1,000 members of the Escanxaque tribe attacked them. After losing the battle, the conquistadors never returned to the area.
Almost a century later, French explorers arrived in south-central Kansas but did not find any sign of Etzanoa or its people.
It was presumed that a disease eradicated the population. The existence of the city came to light when Blakeslee and his team unearthed remnants of the ancient battle.
It’s possible that more large-scale lost cities are hidden nearby. Overall, these types of finds help paint a clearer picture of early American history.
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