---
title: "Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories"
chunk: 7/11
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_transoceanic_contact_theories"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:09:31.175412+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

A small terracotta sculpture of a head, with a beard and European-like features, was found in 1933 in the Toluca Valley, 72 kilometres (45 mi) southwest of Mexico City, in a burial offering under three intact floors of a pre-colonial building dated to between 1476 and 1510. The artifact has been studied by Roman art authority Bernard Andreae, director emeritus of the German Institute of Archaeology in Rome, Italy, and Austrian anthropologist Robert von Heine-Geldern, both of whom stated that the style of the artifact was compatible with small Roman sculptures of the 2nd century. If genuine and if not placed there after 1492 (the pottery found with it dates to between 1476 and 1510), the find provides evidence for at least a one-time contact between the Old and New Worlds.
According to Arizona State University's Michael E. Smith, a leading Mesoamerican scholar named John Paddock used to tell his classes in the years before he died that the artifact was planted as a joke by Hugo Moedano, a student who originally worked on the site. Despite speaking with individuals who knew the original discoverer (García Payón), and Moedano, Smith says he has been unable to confirm or reject this claim. Though he remains skeptical, Smith concedes he cannot rule out the possibility that the head was a genuinely buried post-Classic offering at Calixtlahuaca.

=== 14th- and 15th-century European contact ===

Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney and feudal baron of Roslin (c. 1345 – c. 1400), was a Scottish nobleman who is best known today from a modern legend which claims that he took part in explorations of Greenland and North America almost 100 years before Christopher Columbus's voyages to the Americas. In 1784, he was identified by Johann Reinhold Forster as possibly being the Prince Zichmni who is described in letters which were allegedly written around 1400 by the Zeno brothers of Venice, in which they describe a voyage which they made throughout the North Atlantic under the command of Zichmni. According to The Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, "the Zeno affair remains one of the most preposterous and at the same time one of the most successful fabrications in the history of exploration."
Henry was the grandfather of William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, the builder of Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh, Scotland. The authors Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight believe some carvings in the chapel were intended to represent ears of New World corn or maize, a crop unknown in Europe at the time of the chapel's construction. Knight and Lomas view these carvings as evidence supporting the idea that Henry Sinclair traveled to the Americas well before Columbus. In their book, they discuss meeting with the wife of the botanist Adrian Dyer and state that Dyer's wife told them that Dyer agreed that the image thought to be maize was accurate. In fact, Dyer found only one identifiable plant among the botanical carvings and instead suggested that the "maize" and "aloe" were stylized wooden patterns, only coincidentally looking like real plants. Specialists in medieval architecture have variously interpreted the carvings as stylised depictions of wheat, strawberries, or lilies.
Henry Yule Oldham suggested that the Bianco world map depicted part of the coast of Brazil before 1448. This was immediately opposed by members of the Royal Geographical Society but later repeated by American and European historians. This was later refuted by Abel Fontoura da Costa, who proved that it actually depicted Santiago, the largest island of the Cape Verde archipelago.