Lost city in Kansas open for tours

The Great Plains of Kansas (Photo By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters – Great Plains LCC, Public Domain)

ARKANSAS CITY, Kan. — Limited tours of a lost city are being offered in south-central Kansas.

Donald Blakeslee is an anthropologist and archaeologist at Wichita State University. He announced last year that he had solved a 400-year-old mystery and found the lost city of Etzanoa, The Wichita Eagle reported . The city is located city about 50 miles (80 kilometres) southeast of Wichita.

It will take years for the preservation and development of Etzanoa to be ready for visitors year-round. But for now, Arkansas City historians and leaders are letting the public see some glimpses of what and where the mysterious city once was.

Tours can be arranged through the Cherokee Strip Land Rush Museum, which also offers a documentary on the discovery.

“We take people to three or four of the major contributing sites across town,” said Sandy Randal, Cherokee Strip Land Rush Museum director and co-ordinator of activities for Etzanoa.

The tours are of the remnants of Etzanoa, located on the bluffs near the confluence of the Walnut and Arkansas rivers.

Blakeslee will be leading a monthlong archaeological dig in June along the bluffs and bottomland in search of more artifacts.

Historians believe it was home to 20,000 people between the years 1450 and 1700. The Etzanoans are ancestors of the Wichita tribe, who were farmers and cultivated beans, maize, pumpkin and squash and slaughtered bison.