On the social media site formerly known as Twitter:
Alaric The Barbarian @0xAlaric
There’s a handful of evidence for this. Most of it’s a little fringe or circumstantial, but it exists.
– 500s BC Carthaginian navigator Himilco described the Sargasso Sea; the original work is now lost but it was quoted in Ora Maritima a century later. If you can make it there and back, you know trade winds well enough to take Columbus’ route.
– There’s quite a lot of copper “missing” from the Great Lakes area, and there was more bronze in the Old World than could have possibly been supported by the known copper mining infrastructure there … despite 7,000-year-old copper mines in that region, the local natives didn’t seem to really use copper for much aside from odd pictographic disks.
– The Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head, discovered in 1933, was a bearded terracotta head made before European contact with modern-day Mexico. Its features and style don’t match local populations or material cultures, and it’s been dated to centuries prior. Roman experts ID it as 200s AD Roman art. Even the archaeological community isn’t sure what to make of this one; their best (non-)explanation is “it was a prank”.
– Numerous odd discoveries were made of Old World artifacts in the American West throughout the 19th century. Alleged Roman coins, weapons, tools, etc. Some of these were hoaxes; others have been lost to time; others seem almost covered up. The wildest example is Kincaid’s alleged 1909 discovery of an ancient Egyptian-style tunnel annex hidden in the walls of the Grand Canyon, full of artifacts; and, a similar alleged discovery around Death Valley. The former was reported to have been investigated (maybe covered up?) by the Smithsonian, though they deny this; the latter is on government land now.
– Various Old World artifacts seem to show New World goods or maps; there is a depiction of a pineapple at Pompeii, for example, and c. 350 BC Carthaginian coins show a map of the Mediterranean including the Americas to the west. Certain of Ptolemy’s odd geographic ideas are “corrected” (such as his earth-size estimate) by placing the Antilles as the Fortunate Isles. The Piri Reis Map, compiled in 1513 but surely copied from much older sources, shows a fairly accurate east coast of the Americas, as well as Antarctica. Diodorus Siculus may have even described the Americas as found by the Phoenicians, then kept secret …
– This of course predates Rome and Carthage, but a wide swathe of native cultures had extraordinarily similar oral histories of being visited by ethnically distinct people from the east who taught them aspects of civilization … “But that’s probably nothing, right?”
The field awaits its smoking gun, its Rosetta Stone. But I believe something is out there, just waiting for an enterprising follower of Schliemann to discover it. There’s *something* there.
And in response:
John Ringo SF Author @Jringo1508
The part that does it for me (that there was pre-Viking contact) is just studying the development of pottery and metallurgy in the Old World vs New.
Old World: Burnt bits of clay with markings on them. Poorly formed “pottery” charms. Better made pottery charms. Pottery dishes. Metal ore based glazes. Simple, low temperature, metals.
New World: POTTERY FULLY FORMED AND GOLD AND SILVER EXTRACTION BECAUSE NATIVE AMERICANS ARE AWESOME!
The Carthaginians had a process of going to less advanced areas, teaching them some simple “advanced” technologies that in some way helped out the Carthaginians then trading with them for “stuff”. They’d teach pottery or better pottery techniques so that they (the Carthaginians) didn’t have to load themselves down with empty pots to pick up “stuff”.
They’d then trade stuff like bronze daggers for gold, silver and spices.
So, it entirely makes sense (if you understand the currents) that a Carthaginian/Phoenician (they’re the same) trading/exploring fleet would make it across the Atlantic in one direction (probably in winter), set up a trading center somewhere and start trading wares. They’d leave a few behind to build up a store then sail back.
If they went over in winter and sailed back in summer, good chance they were wiped out by hurricanes.
It could have happened multiple times with a small group of colonists left behind. Their genes would disappear in the wash.
But going from zero to FULLY FORMED POTTERY has always been my reason to know that there was early contact.
