TAC International Film Festival 2022 Keynote Speaker:
Professor and Archaeologist
Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences - Wichita State University
TAC Festival 2022 Keynote Address:
"Quivira and the Three Ps"
Dr. Blakeslee is a professor of Anthropology at Wichita State University, where he has been since 1976. One of the leading archaeologists working in the Great Plains, his research interests range from the time of the earliest settlement of the Americas to the historic period and his work has carried him from Montana to Texas. He also has had a long-term interest in native trails and sacred sites.
Major contributions include numerous publications on the Middle Ceramic period and on radiocarbon dating. Currently, his work focuses on the protohistoric period and on the Walnut River basin during all time periods.
His research has received recognition from the Sigma Xi Honorary Society for Scientific Research (1969, 1980), from the Kansas Academy of Sciences (1996), the Texas Historical Foundation (1997) and Wichita State University (1996, 1998). He is the author of nine books and numerous articles in scholarly and popular journals. He has been president of the Professional Archaeologists of Kansas and of AASCK, a society for amateur archaeologists and currently serves on the board of the Etzanoa Conservancy.
Dr. Don Blakeslee will appear as our Keynote Speaker at the Festival Banquet, presenting on his fieldwork and documentary research focused on the Wichita town of Etzanoa, the present location of Arkansas City, Kansas.
While Arkansas City today has a population of 12,000, the Native American town there had an estimated population of 20,000. A pitched battle took place at this location in 1601 between a force of 1500 Wichita fighters and a Spanish Conquistador army led by Juan de Oñate, who had founded the Spanish colony of New Mexico in 1598. The Wichita fighters repulsed the Spaniards, who never returned to Kansas.
In 2015, a film crew from Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), the Eugene nonprofit that organizes TAC Festival, followed Dr. Blakeslee and his archaeological field school at the Etzanoa site, as they found direct evidence of this battle and the huge Wichita town. Footage from that activity is a key part of the documentary film, Quivira: Conquistadors on the Plains, produced by ALI and now available for viewing on ALI’s subscription video platform, Heritage Broadcasting Service (heritagetac.org).