Etzanoa: The Great Settlement Archaeology Forgot for Four Hundred Years

In sixteen oh one, Spanish explorer Juan de Onate led an expedition north from New Mexico into the southern Great Plains, following reports of a great city of his enemies to the north. His scouts had told him it was enormous. He may not have believed them until he arrived.

Oonate's soldiers documented what they found: a settlement of approximately twelve hundred houses along the banks of a river in what is now southeastern Kansas. Archaeologists have since estimated, based on the scale of those houses and comparable Wichita-tradition sites, that the population may have been as high as twenty thousand people. If accurate, that would make Etzanoa one of the largest Native American settlements north of Mexico at the time of European contact, larger than many European cities of the same period.

The settlement was occupied by ancestors of the Wichita people. Onate found the settlement deserted, and his men later fought a battle with Escanjaque warriors nearby before turning back toward New Mexico. The settlement was documented and then largely forgotten, a city that existed in Spanish colonial records and then slipped out of historical memory for four centuries.

In April of twenty seventeen, a local teenager in Arkansas City, Kansas, found a small iron cannonball in a field, a cannonball that matched sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish military specifications. That discovery prompted archaeologists from Wichita State University to re-examine the surrounding area. Using drone surveys, soil analysis, and excavation, they identified the site of Etzanoa with high confidence.

The Wichita people's ancestors built a metropolis on the Kansas plains. Spanish soldiers fought at its edge and left a cannonball in the dirt. A teenager found it four hundred years later and gave historians back a city they had lost.