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Showing posts with the label #SouthCentralKansas

Archaeologists explore a rural field in Arkansas City,Kansas, and a lost city emerges

Photo by: David Kelly / For The Times #ArkansasCity #Kansas #WSU #AncientSettlement #Etzanoa #SouthCentralKansas Of all the places to discover a lost city, this pleasing little community seems an unlikely candidate. There are no vine-covered temples or impenetrable jungles here — just an old-fashioned downtown, a drug store that serves up root beer floats and rambling houses along shady brick lanes. Yet there’s always been something — something just below the surface. Locals have long scoured fields and river banks for arrowheads and bits of pottery, amassing huge collections. Then there were those murky tales of a sprawling city on the Great Plains and a chief who drank from a goblet of gold. A few years ago, Donald Blakeslee, an anthropologist and archaeology professor at  Wichita State University , began piecing things together. And what he’s found has spurred a rethinking of traditional views on the early settlement of the Midwest, while potentially filling