The “Native American” Shipwreck of 60 BC

“It’s 60 B.C. within the Roman world. The Republic is staggering by its twilight. Pompey and Crassus dominate politics, Cicero is within the Senate, and a younger Julius Caesar is scheming for energy.

Removed from Rome’s marble boards, on the wild northern frontier of Gaul, the governor Quintus Metellus Celer receives a mysterious present. Not amber. Not furs. Not the slaves that oiled the gears of diplomacy on the Rhine frontier.

A gaggle of castaways. Their faces are unfamiliar, their story stranger nonetheless. They declare a storm had ripped them from their homeland, flung them throughout an infinite sea, and left them stranded on the windswept seashores the Romans referred to as Germaniae litora, “the shores of Germany.”

The report calls them Indi, or “Indians.” However did they actually come from India? Or had been they survivors from a land the Romans couldn’t think about, castaways from the Americas, delivered by the Atlantic’s huge conveyor belt?

That is no legend. It’s a two-line report from Rome’s earliest geographers. And if true, it might rewrite the historical past of when Outdated World and New first met…

A Roman governor receives uncommon castaways in 60 BC. Their origin story challenges historic understanding of transatlantic contact. Historic texts and geographic evaluation discover the opportunity of pre-Columbian journey throughout the Atlantic.” from the video introduction