Ancient Rome's Strangest Mystery: The "Native American" Shipwreck of 60 BC

Video from Dark5 Ancient Mysteries

Ancient Rome's Strangest Mystery: The "Native American" Shipwreck of 60 BC

"It’s 60 B.C. in the Roman world. The Republic is staggering through its twilight. Pompey and Crassus dominate politics, Cicero is in the Senate, and a young Julius Caesar is scheming for power.

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

The gift is people.

A group of castaways. Their faces are unfamiliar, their story stranger still. They claim a storm had ripped them from their homeland, flung them across an endless sea, and left them stranded on the windswept beaches the Romans called Germaniae litora, “the shores of Germany.”

The record calls them Indi, or “Indians.” But did they really come from India? Or were they survivors from a land the Romans could not imagine, castaways from the Americas, delivered by the Atlantic’s vast conveyor belt?

This is no legend. It is a two-line report from Rome’s earliest geographers. And if true, it could rewrite the history of when Old World and New first met...

A Roman governor receives unusual castaways in 60 BC. Their origin story challenges historical understanding of transatlantic contact. Ancient texts and geographic analysis explore the possibility of pre-Columbian travel across the Atlantic." from the video introduction

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