I was driving through central Mexico last year with my archaeologist friend,
Javier Tovar, who lives in Atotonilco de Tula, Hidalgo.
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| Atotonilco de Tula, Hidalgo, 65 Kilometers North of Mexico City |
Javier got his degree in archaeology through
INAH's program at
UNAM. We visited as we drove and he told me a stirring story. One of his classmates at INAH was a Bulgarian named
Romeo Hristov who championed ancient transoceanic contacts much to the chagrin of most Mexican archaeologists who wanted their Olmecs, Maya, and Aztecs to have developed without external influences of any kind. It was a matter of national pride. The general attitude was "Our ancients did not need outside help." This is classic isolationist thinking, aka independent inventionism, and it has been the prevalent viewpoint in Americanist studies since the time of Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769 - 1859).
By force of will and dogged persistence, Hristov located in the vast INAH artifact collection a long-misplaced figurine head recovered by professional archaeologists in a controlled excavation at the site of Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca in 1933.
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| Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca, Mexico, 60 Kilometers West of Mexico City |
Found in an unambiguous pre-Hispanic context, this head was stylistically identified as Roman from the second century AD. Hristov had a small particle of the ceramic material dated via thermoluminescence at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. The date came back 1780 plus or minus 400 years before present, corroborating the second century AD classification.
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| Calixtlahuaca Head Frontal View |
This find was described in an article written by Romeo Hristov and Santiago Genovés entitled "Mesoamerican Evidence of Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Contacts," published in
Ancient Mesoamerica, 10 (1999), pp. 207 - 213. The same authors published a Spanish version of their article entitled "Viajes transatlánticos antes de Colón" in
Arqueología mexicana 6/33 (1998) pp. 48-53.
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| Calixtlahuaca Head, Side View |
Hristov has continued his research in the Canary Islands where a Roman colony is now attested on Lanzarote between the first and fourth centuries AD. Hristov got some support for his research from FARMS and John L. Sorenson mentions this find in
Mormon's Codex (Salt Lake City: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and Deseret Book, 2013) p. 239. Naysayers have attempted to explain this piece away but their speculations have been unpersuasive in light of Hristov's meticulous scholarship over many years.
