Was there a New World order we didn’t know about?
The discovery of a 2,000-year-old Roman artifact in Mexico could upend our understanding of the New World, raising the possibility that Italians arrived in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus.
Dubbed the Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca Head, this terracotta sculpture of a bearded man was exhumed by Mexican archaeologist José García Payón in 1933 from its eponymous repository near Mexico City, Arkeonews reported.
The figure was buried in a sealed tomb beneath three intact floor layers of the pyramidal structure, alongside pottery shards, gold ornaments, bone artifacts, and pieces of rock crystal.
While these materials were typical of the time period and region, the noggin was anything but, boasting striking features that skewed more ancient Mediterranean than Mesoamerica.
Then, in 1990, German archaeologist Bernard Andreae suggested that the bust was “without any doubt, Roman,” claiming its hairstyle and beard shape harked back to that of the emperors from the Severan period (193–235 BC).
This was more than just a passing resemblance, too. Through thermoluminescence dating — heating an object and measuring the light it emits from energy stored over time — researchers were able to determine that the relic dated back to between the 9th century BC and the 13th century AD, long before Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492.
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