{"id":98453,"date":"2025-10-14T03:00:28","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T07:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=98453"},"modified":"2025-10-13T09:59:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T13:59:22","slug":"carthaginian-or-roman-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/10\/14\/carthaginian-or-roman-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Carthaginian or Roman America?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the social media site formerly known as <em>Twitter<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/HarmlessYardDog\/status\/1977164921487102244\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Screenshot-2025-10-14-at-09-45-25-Battle-Beagle-on-X-Red-Pill-me-on-the-Romans-or-Carthaginians-483x640.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"483\" height=\"640\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-98454\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Screenshot-2025-10-14-at-09-45-25-Battle-Beagle-on-X-Red-Pill-me-on-the-Romans-or-Carthaginians-483x640.png 483w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Screenshot-2025-10-14-at-09-45-25-Battle-Beagle-on-X-Red-Pill-me-on-the-Romans-or-Carthaginians-452x600.png 452w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Screenshot-2025-10-14-at-09-45-25-Battle-Beagle-on-X-Red-Pill-me-on-the-Romans-or-Carthaginians-113x150.png 113w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Screenshot-2025-10-14-at-09-45-25-Battle-Beagle-on-X-Red-Pill-me-on-the-Romans-or-Carthaginians.png 598w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 483px) 100vw, 483px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/0xAlaric\/status\/1977443267978338502\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Alaric The Barbarian<\/strong> @0xAlaric<\/a><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a handful of evidence for this. Most of it&#8217;s a little fringe or circumstantial, but it exists.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; 500s BC Carthaginian navigator Himilco described the Sargasso Sea; the original work is now lost but it was quoted in <em>Ora Maritima<\/em> a century later. If you can make it there and back, you know trade winds well enough to take Columbus&#8217; route.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; There&#8217;s quite a lot of copper &#8220;missing&#8221; 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 &#8230; despite 7,000-year-old copper mines in that region, the local natives didn&#8217;t seem to really use copper for much aside from odd pictographic disks.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; 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&#8217;t match local populations or material cultures, and it&#8217;s been dated to centuries prior. Roman experts ID it as 200s AD Roman art. Even the archaeological community isn&#8217;t sure what to make of this one; their best (non-)explanation is &#8220;it was a prank&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; 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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; 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&#8217;s odd geographic ideas are &#8220;corrected&#8221; (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 &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; 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 &#8230; &#8220;But that&#8217;s probably nothing, right?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s *something* there.<\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>And in response:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/Jringo1508\/status\/1977515420937859467\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>John Ringo SF Author<\/strong> @Jringo1508<\/a><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Old World: Burnt bits of clay with markings on them. Poorly formed &#8220;pottery&#8221; charms. Better made pottery charms. Pottery dishes. Metal ore based glazes. Simple, low temperature, metals.<\/p>\n<p>New World: POTTERY FULLY FORMED AND GOLD AND SILVER EXTRACTION BECAUSE NATIVE AMERICANS ARE AWESOME!<\/p>\n<p>The Carthaginians had a process of going to less advanced areas, teaching them some simple &#8220;advanced&#8221; technologies that in some way helped out the Carthaginians then trading with them for &#8220;stuff&#8221;. They&#8217;d teach pottery or better pottery techniques so that they (the Carthaginians) didn&#8217;t have to load themselves down with empty pots to pick up &#8220;stuff&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;d then trade stuff like bronze daggers for gold, silver and spices.<\/p>\n<p>So, it entirely makes sense (if you understand the currents) that a Carthaginian\/Phoenician (they&#8217;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&#8217;d leave a few behind to build up a store then sail back.<\/p>\n<p>If they went over in winter and sailed back in summer, good chance they were wiped out by hurricanes.<\/p>\n<p>It could have happened multiple times with a small group of colonists left behind. Their genes would disappear in the wash.<\/p>\n<p>But going from zero to FULLY FORMED POTTERY has always been my reason to know that there was early contact.<\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the social media site formerly known as Twitter: Alaric The Barbarian @0xAlaric There&#8217;s a handful of evidence for this. Most of it&#8217;s a little fringe or circumstantial, but it exists. &#8211; 500s BC Carthaginian navigator Himilco described the Sargasso Sea; the original work is now lost but it was quoted in Ora Maritima a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[362,465,7,15],"tags":[288,1046,346,624,1459,61],"class_list":["post-98453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-americas","category-history","category-technology","tag-archaeology","tag-carthage","tag-hoaxes","tag-maps","tag-metalworking","tag-ships"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-pBX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98453"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98456,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98453\/revisions\/98456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}