In 1924, Charles Minear and his family recovered a lead cross from a layer of caliche that had been exposed by mining. The cross turned out to be two crosses stuck together, and when they were separated, there was a Latin inscription inside! Manier and his friend Thomas Bent returned to the site ready to dig for more artifacts. Together, they found eight crosses, nine swords, 13 spears, one fan, and one tablet, all but the tablet made of lead and containing more Latin inscriptions and some in Hebrew. The men were convinced that this was proof of a Roman settlement in the US long before Columbus. The inscriptions led them to believe this would have been between 775 and 900 AD.
But there were some fishy things about the discovery. The artifacts were recovered in an evenly-spread area, and from different depths in the caliche. No other artifacts were recovered from the site, no pottery, no trash, no evidence of architecture. The dates assigned to the artifacts came from the Latin inscriptions, which were surprisingly helpful, written as if the items they graced were manufactured as souvenirs. And the lead alloy they were made of was suspiciously modern. But the real kicker is the sword with a carving of a brontosaurus on it! The Tucson artifacts are generally regarded as a hoax these days, but no one has ever owned up to it. Read the story of the medieval artifacts found in Tucson, Arizona, at Archaeology Review. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Erin, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)