Etzanoa announced as one of the recipients of the SPRINT grants. For more information from the state see here. An article about the grant and more information can be found here from WIBW and here from the Arkansas City Traveler.More details will be available in the following days.
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1940 Newspaper Article on Wedel Excavations
Arkansas City Daily Traveler 08/08/1940
Transcript
Ruins of Ancient Indian Village Are Sought Northeast of City
A general archaeological survey of Kansas, probably the first of its kind to be attempted, is now under way by Dr. and Mrs. Waldo Wedel of Washington, D. C., and their assistants.
The group is at present camped northeast of the city on the John Goff property and is interesting itself in uncovering the remains of an Indian village which possibly existed about 1600.
“We’re just looking around and we’ve no idea what is here. This is just a preliminary survey to learn the possibilities in this vicinity,” says Dr. Wedel who is assistant curator of archaeology at the United States national [m]useum, a part of the Smithsonian Institute.
Has Staff of Five
For the past 2 ½ summers he has worked in Kansas in an effort to discern the peoples and the land before the settlement of the white man. This summer he has a staff of five, including Mrs. Wedel. The young men are M. F. Kivett, an anthologist student from the University of Nebraska; J. M. Shippee of Kansas City, Mo.; R. G. Slattery, geology student form Georg Washington university at Washington, D. C.; and John Gile, cook, a medical student from the University of Pennsylvania.
A tent city of five “homes” comprises the expedition which travels from place to place in cars. The party will disband in September and Dr. and Mrs. Wedel will resume his regular duties at the museum.
The Indian village site where the party is now exploring was discovered after Monday’s rain washed bits of flints to the surface of the field, which is almost directly west of the camp. It is located on a ridge which is partly on the T. N. Haggard property and partly on the Muret estate farmed by A. T. Larcom. Permission from the owners and tenants is always gained by Dr. Wedel before any excavation is begun and proper papers are always filled out.
‘Cash Pits’ Are Found
So far the diggers have unearthed several “cash pits,” the storage places of the Indians. Each family had three or four of the pits about their homes. The pits were bell-shaped, usually four to seven feet deep and about the same in diameter, and were dug out with bone or small hoes. Corn was usually stored there and, after the corn had spoiled, trash was piled into the hole. Later it was used again as a storage place. In this way, much valuable information is gained now from these old “cash pits” as bits of broke pottery, flints, etc., were swept into the pits as trash in-between the seasons of storing corn.
The Wedels believe this may have been a village of the Wichita tribe which was encamped on
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Ruins of Old Indian Town Sought Here
Continued From Page One
the Arkansas river. Dr. Wedel says there is evidence that the river at that time, 300 to 350 years ago, curved and probably went close to the site of the village.
No home sites have been found, probably because the Wichitas lived in grass huts whose foundations were not substantial enough to have survived the elements. The tribe was evidently in contact with other tribes as pieces of t[ur]quoise, pottery and glass has been found, all evidences of trade with tribes of New Mexico and the Yellowstone.
Dr. Wedel mentions that no indications have been found of horses, which meant that the Indians probably went everywhere on, foot. During that era, the Indians lived mainly by farming and gardening with probably an acre or so allot[t]ed to each family for corn. Meat was supplied by buffalo and wild game.
Mounds at Country Club
There are several Indian mounds about this vicinity that have never been opened, the Wedels reveal. For instance, there are two or three at the Country club, south of the clubhouse. They are about 40 feet across and Dr. Wedel says they should be opened by someone who knows how. But he doesn’t think that his group will have the time.
Before coming to Arkansas City, the party was located near Geneseo, in Rice county, for seven weeks. They worked three villages there, probably belonging to ancestors or descend[a]nts of the same Wichita tribe which was located in the Arkansas City area. They found the usual run of beads, flint drills, bone work and also some evidence of contact with white men, such as iron and glass beads.
This business of archae[o]logy Is not all digging although the digging generally occupies about eight hours a day, from 7 a. m. to 4:30 p. m. Much of the “hard” work is done after the exploration is concluded.
Digging Easiest Task
“The digging is the easiest and most interesting of all,” comments Dr. Wedel, who is a native Kansan having been reared at Newton. “After the day’s digging has been concluded, every piece that has been found, no matter how large or small, has to be classified, the number entered in a catalog to later be checked In Washington when we return there.”
Mrs. Wedel has one of the most tedious tasks. She does a majority of the piecing together of the pottery into its original articles, such as vases, jugs, molds, etc. For the glueing, she uses ordinary household cement and, would you believe it, she uses ordinary nail polish remover to remove the excess glue or take any pieces apart. This polish remover is an expensive form of acetone.
The Wedels have received much of their information about Indian lore and relics from local persons who are interested in such work. They are appreciative of this information, they declare.
End Transcript
Unfolding Story: Archeology field school to present new finds
By FOSS FARRAR CourierTraveler Correspondent
Original Article
https://www.ctnewsonline.com/news/article_67ca7cee-f40c-11ec-8b31-17c2c358e31a.html
Jun 25, 2022
A new chapter of the Etzanoa story may be unfolding.
Archaeology students this month have uncovered new clues indicating that the Etzanoa people’s encounter in 1601 with Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate and his troops was not the last time they faced off with the Europeans.
Twenty college students working at an Arkansas City dig site under the direction of two Wichita State University archaeologists are expanding an excavation pit deeper and wider. This is the fifth year WSU has conducted field schools at the site.
The WSU archaeologists, Don Blakeslee and co-director of the field school Crystal Dozier will present a wrap-up of what was found during this month’s dig at 6 p.m. Wednesday in the Wright Room of Cowley College’s Brown Center. The presentation is free and open to the public.
A couple of weeks ago, the students uncovered three wood-post holes that — when added to three other post holes found in a previous year’s dig — indicate that an arbor existed at the site hundreds of years ago.
The evidence uncovered by students this month complicates the narrative of what happened at the site and when it happened, said Blakeslee, who is leading the field school for the fifth year.
“We have an arbor, a big oval structure with a thatched roof,” Blakeslee told area residents who visited the dig site recently. Existence of the post holes are indicated by a difference in soil color and texture where the posts were placed, compared with surrounding soil.
He said the biggest soil mold is six feet in diameter and six feet deep, and represents “rodent runs,” or a post hole disrupted by rodents rummaging through it to find scraps of food buried in food storage and trash pits.
“People lived here for 250 years at least,” Dozier said. “So what you get is a mixture of stuff.”
The ancestral Wichita occupied the lower Walnut River area from about 1300 to 1700, Dozier said.
Etzanoa was a large settlement of an estimated 20,000 ancestral Wichita that stretched at least five miles along the banks of the lower Walnut River, according to documented measurements taken by the Spanish explorers in 1601.
Student findings
That day, the field school students — working in 90-plus degree weather — were digging carefully in several deep rectangular pits. They were shaving down thin dirt walls that separated the pits, and were taking notes on what they found.
“We’re finding scrapers, stone punchers, knives,” Blakeslee said. “We’re getting broken and throw-away stuff.”
The students showed the dig site visitors what they had uncovered. The discoveries included intact arrow points uncovered by WSU students Angie Guevara, a senior, and Cecilia Zmudzinski, who is working on a master’s degree.
A partially intact arrow point about the size of a penny was shown by WSU senior Brandon Lasiter.
“We’ve found a couple of other ones, too,” he said. “They were used to hunt bison. The natives attached them at the end of an arrow and aimed them to hit the lungs or heart of a bison. They would be very accurate.”
Hannah Forker, a senior University of Kansas archaeology student from Haven, was digging down a wall between rectangular pits. She was carefully digging around a potential stone artifact uncovered in the wall. She made notes of the find.
Spanish artifacts
Evidence of an open-air shelter covered with a thatched roof, along with four Spanish artifacts found previously at the site, suggest a later Spanish encounter with the ancestral Wichita who lived at Etzanoa, Blakeslee said. It probably took place in the late 1600s after the Pueblo Revolt.
The artifacts found last year included a small piece of glass not flattened on one side that experts have identified as an item manufactured in 17th century Europe, probably a part of a fancy glass goblet.
Other Spanish artifacts found at the dig site in previous years include a horseshoe nail, a rusted fragment of metal, and a button.
“The horseshoe nail maybe was from Oñate’s visit, but you add to that the button, piece of glass — they weren’t there long enough for all those things to be left behind,” Blakeslee said.
He noted that Oñate and his men were only at Etzanoa for about three days.
Etzanoa Director an Extra in Killers of the Flower Moon
Etzanoa Director, Sandy Randel, was cast as an extra in the Killers of the Flower Moon movie adaptation currently being filmed in Tulsa, Bartlesville, Pawhuska and Fairfax, Oklahoma.
Killers of the Flower Moon is an adaptation of the book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which is a non-fiction book authored by American journalist David Grann in 2017.
The upcoming movie adaptation is directed by Martin Scorsese and will star Leonardo DiCaprio, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow, and Robert De Niro. The movie’s budget is over $200 million and will be released theatrically by Paramount Pictures and stream on Apple TV+ in 2022.
The story follows a Texas Ranger and a team of FBI agents as they attempt to uncover the truth behind over 24 murders. All the murders were of Osage families who had accumulated wealth from the discovery of oil on Osage Indian nation land in Oklahoma. At the time, in the 1920’s, this was the FBI’s first major homicide investigation.
For more information, see the link: Back In Time: Osage Murders – Reign of Terror – YouTube
Etzanoa Visits the Kansas House
The Cowley CourierTraveler
April 7, 2017
Kansas House formally recognizes Etzanoa
By FOSS FARRAR
Etzanoa Conservancy
TOPEKA — The Kansas House of Representatives on Wednesday recognized recent archaeological research pointing to Arkansas City as the site of the huge ancestral Wichita settlement of Etzanoa.
House members applauded after approving a resolution that was read by Anita Judd-Jenkins, Republican representative from Ark City.
Standing behind her as she read from a podium were several Ark City residents, archaeologists and archaeology enthusiasts who have promoted and participated in the studies of the prehistoric Native American site.
“Based on the evidence, the Etzanoa archaeological site of a 5-mile-long settlement of an estimated 20,000 ancestors of the Wichita tribe, thrived from about 1425 to the early 1700s,” Judd-Jenkins said in prepared remarks.
“Archaeologists agree that a city of this size would be the second-largest prehistoric Native American site ever discovered in the U.S. and Canada, making it a possible candidate for being designated as both a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and a National Historic Landmark.”
Judd-Jenkins noted that Spanish explorers in 1601 followed up on a previous search for Quivira, the land of the “lost cities of gold.” Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an earlier expedition to central Kansas in the early 1540s.
In 1601, Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate, the first governor of New Mexico, led 130 men on the trek north and east from New Mexico into Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Oñate and his men eventually reached a town near the confluence of two rivers that they called the “Great Settlement.” The natives called the town “Etzanoa.”
The Spaniards documented the visit to Etzanoa, including their observations and measurements of the town and their estimate of its population. Their observations were recorded a year later in Mexico City. A large volume comprising those documents includes two expedition maps. It is now preserved in Seville, Spain.
Judd-Jenkins introduced the following people who traveled to Topeka to witness her presentation:
Don Blakeslee, Wichita State University professor of archaeology; Robert Hoard, State Archaeologist of the Kansas Historical Society; Otis Morrow, V.J. Wilkins Foundation trustee; Karen Zeller, V.J. Wilkins Foundation trustee; Nick Hernandez, city manager of Arkansas City; and Jay Warren, city commissioner and former mayor of Arkansas City.
Hap Mcleod, Etzanoa Conservancy president; Adam Ziegler, Lawrence Free State High School student and discoverer of the first Spanish artifact at the Etzanoa battle site; and the following Etzanoa Conservancy members — Jann Ziegler, who is Adam’s grandmother; Carol House, archaeological site land owner; Jason Smith; and Foss Farrar.
In her presentation, Judd-Jenkins said citizens of Ark City have long known that the area near the confluence of the Arkansas and Walnut Rivers in eastern Arkansas City was someplace special. In 1870s, early Ark City residents found many Native American artifacts including broken pots, earth pits full of bones, rock carvings and tools.
Judd-Jenkins summarized findings from recent field studies conducted along the banks of the lower Walnut River in eastern areas of Ark City.
Archaeological teams who surveyed eastern Ark City prior to the building of the U.S. 77 bypass found artifacts dating from 600 to 1800 AD, based on carbon dating, she said. And a large-scale field study in Ark City during the summer of 2015 using some of the latest archaeological technology turned up more artifacts, including metal balls fired in canister shots from canons during a battle at the southern end of Etzanoa.
WSU archaeologist Blakeslee organized and led the 2015 archaeological study. Blakeslee’s teams spent a week in surveying the Etzanoa site in Ark City and another week in Lyons doing follow-up studies of a Quivira site there. He and his teams used magnetometers and metal detectors as well as a mobile archaeological lab that tested potential artifacts.
“With the generous funding of the V.J. Wilkins Foundation, the Archaeology Channel spent two weeks filming the 2015 archaeological studies conducted by Dr. Blakeslee and his teams,” Judd-Jenkins said, “with the cooperation and support from the city of Arkansas City, and the Arkansas City Historical Society.”
Then she announced that the Archaeology Channel’s film, “Quivira: Conquistadors on the Plains,” was being shown continuously on Wednesday in the Statehouse Visitors Center Auditorium.
“It describes the work and discovery of the true Etzanoa on the banks of the Walnut River in south-central Kansas, just above the Oklahoma border,” she said.
Monday, April 3, 2017
Wichita State University
- Wichita State professor of archaeology Donald Blakeslee began on-site research of the town of Etzanoa in 2015.
- Since then, he has worked to rewrite the history of the town, which was previously thought to be a cluster of villages.
- Blakeslee has involved Wichita State students with the research and hopes to continue researching the site in years to come.
Donald Blakeslee, professor of archaeology at Wichita State University, presented in March at the annual conference of the Society for American Archaeology discussing recent archaeological evidence that shows a thriving ancestral Wichita Indian town of more than 20,000 residents near Arkansas City, Kansas.
The discovery began with new translations of old Spanish documents by the Cibola Project at the University of California, Berkley. Members of the team made photocopies of the original documents, re-transcribed them from the Old Spanish and then retranslated them. Earlier historians and archaeologists who had used the documents dealt with misleading errors in transcription and translation, which is why many archaeological discoveries in the area were misinterpreted.
“It has been a lot of fun to rewrite the record so thoroughly. By joining the historical written record to the archaeology, we ended up rewriting both fields,” says Blakeslee. “Rather than a cluster of 30 little villages, there was a single town of 20,000 people.”
Research of the town, called Etzanoa, has completely revised the understanding of protohistoric settlements in the southern plains. Previous scholars often dismissed the Spanish population estimates as exaggerations, but with the evidence of the archaeological finds it can no longer be dismissed.
“One implication is that Old World epidemic diseases had not yet reached this region, but probably did so by around 1650, because there were far fewer Wichitas when the French arrived in 1718,” says Blakeslee.
Blakeslee reported archaeology that coincides with eyewitness accounts from five soldiers of Spanish explorer and founder of New Mexico, Juan de Oñate, who were interviewed in Mexico City in 1602.
Scattered surface finds match the description of the town as extending about five miles, and the description of the landscape and route of the Spanish army also line up. The biggest piece of confirmation came with the discovery of the site of a battle fought there in 1601. Metal detectors were used to uncover small iron shot from in front of the ravine where natives took shelter and well beyond it where shots eventually fell.
Blakeslee began work at the site in 2015 when he invited leaders of the Wichita tribe to visit and spent a week there researching. He’s been able to involve WSU students with the research as well and has taken them to the site each summer since. They plan to be there for four weeks during summer 2017.
“Work at Etzanoa will continue for the rest of my career and beyond,” says Blakeslee. “It will be an important part of WSU’s future.”
Searching For Etzanoa
Mar 14, 2016
American Archaeology Magazine
Searching For Etzanoa
Researchers may have found one of North America’s largest prehistoric settlements in Kansas.
By David Malakoff.
In the early summer of 1601, Juan de Oñate, a conquistador who helped establish the Spanish colony of New Mexico, set off on a search to find Quivira, a fabled “city of gold.” Led by the lone survivor of an earlier expedition, Oñate marched east from his base near what is now Santa Fe with some 200 soldiers and several cannons, as well as a dozen priests and a large gaggle of camp followers. Along the way, the explorers encountered herds of American bison, marveling at these “most monstrous cattle” and the Apache hunters who stalked them. And they were among the first Europeans to describe the lush prairies of the Great Plains, with “grasses so high that in many places they hid a horse.”
Oñate’s most eye-popping discovery, however, was yet to come. That fall, his band reached a river located somewhere near what is now the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Its banks were lined with more than a thousand large, thatched-roof buildings, scattered among fields of corn, squash, and beans. Many of the inhabitants had fled before Oñate’s arrival, and astonished scouts reported that the town stretched on for miles. “The end of the houses was not in sight,” soldiers later told Spanish officials, estimating that some 20,000 people lived in the settlement they dubbed Etzanoa.
For centuries, many scholars discounted Oñate’s account of Etzanoa. Conquistadors had a reputation for exaggerating, they said, in order to impress their royal bosses and church officials eager to save souls. Archaeologists and anthropologists also were skeptical. Now, however, some recent archaeological discoveries—and some fresh translations of accounts of Oñate’s journey—may be changing that argument. Researchers say they have found preliminary evidence of Etzanoa in south-central Kansas near Arkansas City.
Summary. Read More in our Spring 2016 Issue of American Archaeology, Vol. 20 No. 1.
Plans For Exploration
The Arkansas City Traveler
Plans for large-scale exploration outlined
By FOSS FARRAR
Traveler correspondent
January 27, 2015
A community of Wichita tribe ancestors who settled between the two rivers that converge southeast of Arkansas City is one of the two largest prehistoric settlements of Native Americans in the United States, a Wichita State University archaeologist said Thursday night.
With an estimated population of 20,000 people and an area more than five miles long, the Ark City settlement is now thought to be the first or second largest Native American settlement, with the other large one in the St. Louis area, WSU professor Don Blakeslee said.
Blakeslee spoke to a classroom full of people attending a meeting of the Cowley Public Archaeology and History Group at Cowley College’s Webb-Brown Academic Building. He was introduced by group sponsor Chris Mayer, anthropology instructor at the college.
He outlined plans for a large-scale exploration of the Ark City area and other sites in Rice and McPherson counties where ancestors of the Wichita settled.
Blakeslee said he plans to lead the digs in late May and early June.
Sensitive equipment including ground-penetrating radar and a magnetometer is likely to be used for the explorations, he said. The magnetometer can be used to find burned remains of houses that have been buried by time.
“This summer we will start up in Rice and McPherson counties and spend the third week here,” he said. “These places between recorded sites — we want to know what’s there.”
Blakeslee encouraged people in Ark City to participate in the exploration. He suggested that, for example, students of local schools could “look in the dirt” in their home gardens to check for Native American artifacts.
“You’re sitting on this incredible archaeological site and where is your museum display?” he said. “Your kids ought to be familiar with this.”
Recent evidence has shown that the areas of Kansas settled by the ancestors of the Wichita were more extensive than previous archaeologists thought, Blakeslee said.
The evidence includes a new translation of a 1602 document detailing an expedition by Spanish explorers to this area during the previous year, and a map made of the expedition. The map and descriptions by men who were on the expedition reveal that there was a large Native American settlement around what is now Ark City.
“This past summer I ran across a new translation of old documents of the (Juan de) Onate expedition,” Blakeslee said. “The UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) linguists did brilliant interpretations — like native speakers.”
Three men on the expedition including a very observant sailor were quizzed on the Ark City site by the viceroy in Mexico City, he said.
“Balthazar (the sailor) was interested in what he saw and measured things,” he said. “He measured circular houses and gave the range of circumferences in paces.”
The sailor described the settlement as composed of clusters of large, beehive-shaped grass houses separated from one another, Blakeslee said. There were 30 to 40 houses per cluster. He also gave a range of distances between clusters and said that between them were corn fields.
‘Game-changer’ for archaeology
A tally of the houses counted by Balthazar (2,000) multiplied by the average number of people who occupied each house (10) shows that “the first census said there were 20,000 people in Ark City, and that doesn’t include (a) site up near Winfield,” Blakeslee said.
“This is a game-changer for archaeology,” he said. Previous studies had underestimated the size and importance of the Great Bend Aspect, he said.
Archaeologists have followed up on the work of Waldo Wedel, the “father of Kansas archaeology” who led expeditions in Rice and Cowley counties in the 1940s, Blakeslee said.
Wedel spent part of the summer of 1940 performing archeological investigations at the Arkansas City Country Club (now Great Life Golf and Fitness). The dig uncovered bits of evidence in what appears to have been a huge Indian village.
The Native Americans who lived along river banks in Kansas from 1450 to 1708 were referred to by Wedel as the Great Bend Aspect. “That’s fancy classification terminology for ancestors of the Wichita Indians,” Blakeslee said.
Clusters of habitations and camp sites of the Wichita tribes have been discovered all over eastern Kansas, into Oklahoma and over into Missouri, he said. They include sites in Marion County, Augusta, Winfield, Neodesha and Kay County.
Collectors have found Indian artifacts in other areas around Ark City and in Winfield that have not been mapped out, he said, including near the Spring Hill Golf course. They are northwest of the sites that Wedel examined.
“The Arkansas City cluster keeps growing,” he said. “Our understanding of sizes and numbers of sites is not quite accurate.”
Archaeological studies also have been performed on two sites just south of the Cowley County line in Kay County, known as the Deer Creek and Bryson-Paddock sites, Blakeslee said.
“This is where some of these people moved about 1718 — two fortified sites with lots of French trade goods,” Blakeslee said.
“The question is, is there more,” he said.
The ancestors of the Wichita used stone tools for various tasks, predominately related to skinning bison hides and processing bison meat, he said. But they used the tools to make musical instruments, pottery, paint brushes and painting materials.
Blakeslee showed slides of many of these types of artifacts found at archaeological sites in Kansas.
Blakeslee went to the Google Earth website and focused in on a large fairway at the the Great Life and Fitness golf course, projecting the image on a screen for the audience to see. Visible were faint circles on the ground along the fairway. “These are probably houses and storage pits,” he said.
Also visible near the fairway was a mysterious linear feature leading from bluff and into crops. And another outline looked like it could have been a building with one side convex.
Archaeologists would check with land owners before any study is conducted and would respect the owners’ wishes on what areas could be looked at, Blaskeslee said. They would not take any artifacts from the site unless the owner gives them permission.
In the 1990s, archaeologists attempting to study the country club area sought permission from owners of the land but were refused permission to do so, he said.
“I guess they thought we were going to dig up fairways, but we don’t just go in and do that sort of thing,” he said. “We talk to the land owners about what we’d like to do.”
Other areas that Blakeslee would like to explore during the first week in June when he plans to do the study here:
• An area southwest of the country club area — roughly midway to the river bluff at south end of town — where there is a cave with rock art.
• A field on the south side of the river bluff at the south end of town. According to a Spanish account, the Wichita ancestors had gone down the river and a hostile tribe from the south ran them off and one of their buildings got burned, Blakeslee said.