A tiny black terracotta head locked away for years in a Mexican museum may prove that the Romans reached the New World 1,200 years before Christopher Columbus. The sculpted head of a bearded man, dug up in the Toluca valley, 65 miles west of Mexico City in 1933, has been identified as Roman by art experts and dated to the third century AD by a sophisticated new dating technique.
When it was originally unearthed, the artefact, only a few centimetres high, was in a burial chamber under three floors which, archaeologists concluded, could not have been sealed earlier than 1510, a decade before the first known European landing in central America.
According to Roman Hristov, a US anthropologist, this is the first real proof of human contacts across the Atlantic before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
This week's New Scientist reports that Hristov and a Mexican colleague, Santiago Genovés, had read about the head and finally tracked it down, locked in the vaults of a museum in the Mexican capital.
The head looks unlike the artwork produced by the native peoples of the region before Columbus.
But the notion that it proves Roman contacts with pre-Columbian America will face stiff resistance from hordes of academics in a bitterly contested field.
Scientists have suggested that Vikings, Celts and Africans may have crossed the Atlantic before Columbus. Remains of a settlement in Newfoundland have been identified as the gateway to the Vikings' fabled Vinland.
David Grove, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told the New Scientist that the head was Roman, but pointed out it could have been washed ashore from a Roman shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico - not exactly a Roman "discovery" of the New World.
