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Roman Coins in the New World

1/2/2015

15 Comments

 
There have been a couple of interesting blog posts I’ve read over the last few days that seem important to share with my readers. First is Andy White’s latest exploration of Jim Vieira’s claims for lost giants. This time he takes on a supposed first-person account of witnessing the excavation of a giant. According to the gigantology version of the story, a man in 1938 claimed to have seen a giant skeleton in 1876 and used that memory to carve a wooden model of the same. I’ll leave you to read for yourself the detective work that reveals this story to be a trick of memory, but the fact that Vieira failed to trace back the easily accessible primary sources that clearly reveal that the story is false shows how threadbare the research behind gigantology really is.
Next is a fun reflection on a debunking that happened four decades ago. Brad Lepper shares a classic incident from the annals of fringe history. In 1928, a corroded black disk was found just below the surface of Seip Mound, an earthwork in Ohio. The finders of the coin sold it to a jeweler, who in turn showed it to another man who thought it resembled a Roman coin from the reign of Maximinus (235-238 CE). Some began to speculate about the coin’s Roman origins and what this meant for mound investigation. Geneticist Clyde Keeler started investigating in 1969 and became convinced it was a Roman coin. But when he published an account of it in the New England Antiquities Research Association Newsletter in 1972, he had changed his tune.

Keeler cleaned the “coin” and uncovered some lettering on it that he thought was Latin. Because he was primed to believe that the Romans could have visited Ohio, Keeler admitted that he quickly saw in ambiguous shapes the Roman goddess Victoria, and in half-effaced letters an inscription to someone called Tolinus. Showing it to numismatists, he received a variety of opinions, including several who claimed that the piece was an authentic Roman coin. However, upon further investigation, he conclusively identified the disk as an 1874 advertising token for the Elgin Watch Company, whose half-effaced name he misread as Tolinus and in whose corroded image of Father Time with his hourglass he saw Winged Victory.

Lepper goes on to cite Jeremiah F. Epstein’s 1980 Current Anthropology article on Old World coins supposedly found in America, which, in turn, draws on the work of Frederick J. Pohl, the same fringe theorist who helped fabricate the claim that Henry Sinclair traveled to Nova Scotia in 1398 and was worshiped there as a god. Epstein concluded that nearly all of the coins found in such contexts seem to have been lost from modern collections, with the majority having been lost in the past three decades.

This little incident came a century after Benson John Lossing wrote in his 1848 Pictorial Description of Ohio pretty much exactly the same thing that Epstein would write in 1980:
But great caution is necessary in arriving at a correct conclusion respecting the antiquities in question, lest the remains of the early French settlers should be mistaken for the handiwork of the aborigines. Knives, pickaxes, copper-kettles, pottery, medals, and even Roman coin, have been found beneath the earth and their origin referred to the ancient people of whom we have obtained a few glimpses. These, doubtless, have been deposited by those Europeans who, soon after the earlier discoveries, traversed Ohio and the neighboring region, and, therefore, possess no antiquarian interest beyond that which the influence of association creates in the mind.
And yet we have to keep relearning that lesson.

One thing I learned from Epstein is that the very first claim of a Roman coin in the Americas was made in 1533, when Lucio Marineo Siculo, a Sicilian scholar living in Spain, made the claim in describing Panama in Book 19 of his De rebus Hispaniae memorabilibus. This was the only account of a Roman coin in the Americas until the nineteenth century, according to Epstein, and is widely considered to be the Italian author’s attempt to fabricate a claim to Italian glory in the face of Spanish mastery of the Americas. I was interested enough to fish out the passage and translate it:
Yet there is one thing in this place that I shall not pass over in silence because it is most remarkable and most worthy to be known, especially since others, so far as I have observed, have omitted it in their writings. In a certain region, which is said to be on the mainland [near Darien], whose bishop was Juan de Quevedo, of the Minor Order [a Franciscan], there was discovered by men digging in the earth searching for gold a coin with the name and image of Caesar Augustus. Juan Rufo, archbishop of Consencia, obtaining this, sent it to Rome, to the Supreme Pontiff, as a remarkable object. This wonderful thing has ripped the glory from the sailors of our time, who once boasted that they had sailed there before all others, since the evidence of this coin now makes certain that the Romans once reached the Indies.
Lucio Marineo: The Scott Wolter of sixteenth century Castile. 

Bartolome de Las Casas took issue with Marineo’s claim, as well as the similar claim of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo that the Hesperides as given in Pliny were the Americas, and he assembled an elaborate explanation of the evidence that the Romans had no knowledge of the New World. This argument, in turn, inspired Francisco López de Gómara to specifically attack the Hesperides theory and instead declare the America was in fact Atlantis, and therefore its discovery predated the Romans. His work, in turn, would give rise to more than 450 years of Atlantis speculation.
15 Comments
Shane Sullivan
1/2/2015 07:29:04 am

Jason, if you're not careful, people might start to get the impression that you *aren't* an Italian apologist looking to steal credit from the intrepid Scandinavians who discovered a completely uninhabited North American continent and the planted the Kensington Runestone over century before the birth of Columbus! =P

But, speaking of pre-Columbian Scandinavian contact with North America, did you read that link The Other J. posted yesterday?

http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/science-viking-presence-arctic-canada-02349.html

Reply
Dan
1/2/2015 09:40:10 am

I posted about the Baffin Island discoveries several weeks ago in these comments. There is a clear evidence that the Norse reached the Canadian arctic around the year 1000.

Reply
The Other J.
1/2/2015 08:14:59 pm

Sorry I missed your earlier comment. I just stumbled across that story in a sidebar to another article I was reading.

I guess there's not enough evidence to tell one way or the other at this point, but it'd be interesting to find out if they stayed at Baffin longer than L'anse Aux Meadows, and how much contact they had with the indigenous people.

Jason Colavito link
1/2/2015 10:48:41 am

I've read about excavations of Viking material on Baffin island for quite a while now. It would be the logical place to expect to find Viking material, located between Greenland and Newfoundland, where the Vikings were already known to be.

Reply
Dan
1/2/2015 11:50:38 am

Actually, Baffin Island is almost directly west of Greenland and L'anse Aux Meadows is almost directly south (slightly southwest). The three locations are 3 points of a triangle.
That being said, these archeological finds date back to the 1960s, but really the most interesting discoveries have been in the last 3 years, including a major find a few weeks ago. Baffin very possibly predates Newfoundland and would supplant L'anse Aux Meadows as the earliest European contact with North America.

Jason Colavito link
1/2/2015 01:13:30 pm

You're of course right about the location of Baffin Island. That's what I get for not checking a map first. Still, one would expect that the Vikings would have looked west as well as south of Greenland. It will be interesting to see if further research finds that the site predates L'Anse aux Meadows.

Coridan
1/2/2015 03:57:50 pm

Three points anywhere always make a triangle. That is how triangles work =p

Do Italians really take a whole lot of pride in Columbus? I live in NJ with a pretty large Italian-American population and I've never heard of any such thing. Most Americans connect him more with Spain I would think.

Shane Sullivan
1/2/2015 05:55:20 pm

"Do Italians really take a whole lot of pride in Columbus?"

Probably not. I'd never heard of it until certain KRS enthusiasts accused Jason of being bias because of it.

EP
1/3/2015 05:53:41 am

He is indeed recognized by Italians as a prominent countryman.

L Bean
1/2/2015 08:11:36 am

I am LMAO.

<i>"Lucio Marineo: The Scott Wolter of sixteenth century Castile. "</i>

It would be fun to compile a list of historical Wolters, wouldn't it?

Reply
Denise
1/2/2015 08:24:46 am

From what I can see, compiling such a list could be a long and arduous task......and perhaps a bit depressing.

Reply
Nogin the Nog
1/2/2015 11:30:22 am

Kirsten A. Seaver, The Last Vikings: The Epic Story of The Great Norse Voyagers (L. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2014) contains a postscript "The Fictional Norse In North America" (pages 203-218)

Reply
John Dunham
1/3/2015 04:53:59 am

Jason - I still think this is the interesting topic, and up until Mr, Wolter started chasing treasures it is why I thought the premise of AU was worth spending valuable TV time on.

The fact is that the Clovis people, and the Incas, and the American Indians all got to the Americas from Eurasia at some point. The Vikings also did so for sure in the Middle Ages, so the premise of the show is logical. If you look hard enough and have an open mind you may actually find a bunch of examples of pre-Columbian contact.

Obviously there could not have been any sort of major long-term contact, or else the small pox and disease epidemics that wiped out most of the civilizations in the Americas would not have happened, but there is no logical reason why there could not have been some small scale contacts - mariners blown off course, Templar raiding parties, what ever.

The problem with most of those looking for evidence of these contacts is that they have some sort of strange religiosity about them (they all seem to involve holy grails and Jesus blood or something) and are thus based more on faith than fact. Its the nuttiness that brings the whole AU/Templar/Runestone/etc house of cards down, not the idea that contacts could have occurred.

As I have said before in these comments, I would love to see someone with a more logical approach look into these possibilities, not just to debunk stuff, but to also explore. That was what made the first season of AU interesting - looking at things that were odd. If Wolter were more like - say Colavito - and looked at things logically, this would have turned out to have been interesting. An example is the stuff that Don Wildman does when he goes down into city sewers and finds old Roman or Medieval foundations.

Maybe you should start doing them and H2 could pick you up after they fire Wolter??

Reply
Only Me
1/3/2015 12:12:11 pm

The main problem with Wolter, et. al., is they believe Jason's analysis of their claims means he has ruled out *any* possibility of pre-Columbian contact from the Old World, and he does so to maintain the status quo. In reality, while such accidental or short-term contact events are possible, there has been, to date, no archaeological evidence to support/confirm them.

Jason has mentioned more than once, the story of "Eskimos" possibly making it to Europe after being blown off course. Why wouldn't anyone want to investigate the details of that?

If AU was testing the waters of treasure hunting episodes, they could have looked at something, like, the legend(s) of the lost ship in the Colorado/Mojave desert. That's a tale that's been around since the 1600s, and since the ship is allegedly a Spanish galleon, wouldn't that have been more up Wolter's alley?

I agree that the premise was good. Unfortunately, I think it was always more about Scott Wolter than the premise.

Reply
John Dunham
1/4/2015 04:38:06 am

Exactly what Jason has said before - there are a bunch of different relics etc, but none have yet been proven to be anything pre-Columbian except for the viking landings.

Again, H2 has this agenda to make everything about either Nazis or Jesus (Templars) so the possibility for anything logical on the network is limited. I would guess a show about penguins on H2 would feature underground Nazi Antarctic cities where they are storing the holy grail blood for the Apocalypse.

That said, the topic of American folklore and mysteries is very interesting. The potential assassination of Lewis, the Anasazi, even the Kensington Runestone provide interesting topics to discuss, research and understand - exactly what Jason does on this site.

I for one find this to be interesting, but AU just turns the topics silly.

Take the Great Wall of San Francisco. Had Wolter gone out there and looked at it, discussed the potential of Chinese, Polynesian, American Indian, Spanish and modern builders it would have been an interesting hour of TV - there would have been some history as well as some wild speculation and the whole country would have learned about a lovely state park in the Bay Area.

Pretty much the same could be said about any of the episodes. Problem is that the crazy speculation starts right after the first break and - well then I usually start to either nod off, or start tying knots in a piece of twine to stay awake.


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