Okay I spent an hour typing this this morning before I went to work and it didnt post so here goes. In 1963, as workers began construction on the Sherman Minton Bridge in Louisville, a large cache of Roman coins was dug up during excavation. According to one source, the coins were buried in a way that suggested they had originally been buried in a bag or pouch, which had long since rotted away. One of the coins bore the likeness of Emperor Claudius II, circa A.D. 268. Two of the coins ended up on display in the Falls of the Ohio Museum in Clarksville, Indiana, but in 2004, were ordered removed by the state. Apparently, Indiana has a specific archaeological policy forbidding the suggestion that pre-Columbian contact with other cultures occurred, and so the coin exhibit was packed up and has presumably been filed away in some forgotten box in a dusty storage room. Some years after the Louisville find, a man discovered Roman coins in a cave in Breathitt County. Interestingly, these coins were from the same general time period as the ones dug up in 1963-known as antoniniani coins, theyre from somewhere between A.D. 238 and 305. The Red River Gorge area in Powell County is rampant with unexplainable pictographic art and carvings, and some of them have been declared, at one time or another, to be seemingly of Roman origin. One such pictograph that purportedly depicted a Roman emperor with the solar crown motif was destroyed by vandals in the 1980s. What, if anything, does it all mean? That the Roman Empire actually visited America? Possibly, but not necessarily. Anyone can purchase ancient Roman coins even today, and they were no doubt even more plentiful n centuries past. Its not unthinkable that some later travelers carried these coins here, although they would probably still have been pre-Columbian tr4avelers and thus still fly in the face of historical decorum.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 01:45:07 +0000
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