When you think of lost cities, you definitely don’t think of Kansas. But that’s exactly what archeologists found when investigating an old legend in a rural field of Arkansas City, Kansas.
For years the community would entertain stories of a city on the Great Plains where a chief drank from a gold goblet, Los Angeles Times reported.
Locals would also find arrowheads and pieces of pottery along fields and river banks. And like a real-life Indian Jones, anthropologist and archaeology professor at Wichita State University Donald Blakeslee was determined to track this lost city down.
He became intrigued by the lost city after UC Berkeley retranslated Spanish accounts of their journey into Kansas.
“I thought, ‘Wow, their eyewitness descriptions are so clear it’s like you were there.’ I wanted to see if the archaeology fit their descriptions,” he said. “Every single detail matched this place.”
He used the translated documents written by Spanish conquistadors more than 400 years ago along with high-tech equipment to find what he believes is the lost city of Etzanoa.
Etzanoa was believed to have been home to about 20,000 people between 1450 and 1700.
The inhabitants of Etzanoa lived in beehive-shaped houses that were five miles long along the bluffs and banks of the Walnut Arkansas rivers.
Blakeslee and his associates unearthed three half-inch iron balls underneath the field which is believed to have been fired from a Spanish cannon.
A Spanish horseshoe nail was also found.
“It’s a great story,” said Warren “Hap” McLeod, whose backyard was the dig site. “There was a lost city right under our noses. Lots of artifacts have been taken from here.”
Thousands more artifacts were found in the area when road construction took place in 1994.
Archaeologist Waldo Wedel wrote in “An Introduction to Kansas Archeology” that the valley floor and bluffs “were littered with sherds, flints, and other detritus” that went on for miles.”
“Now we know why,” McLeod said. “There were 20,000 people living here for over 200 years.”
Other archeologists say that Blakeslee’s findings could be Etznoa but they’d like more evidence.
“So this was not some remote place. The people traded and lived in huge communities,” Blakeslee said. “Everything we thought we knew turns out to be wrong. I think this needs a place in every schoolbook.”
Either way, Arkansas City plans to cash in on their “lost city” claim.
“We get about 10 calls a day to see the lost city,” Pamela Crain, director of the Convention & Visitors Bureau, said. “The vision is to have a visitors center. The other key is to persuade landowners to allow people onto their property.”
Learn more about Etzanoa in the video below.
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