The Tucson artifacts
Lead crosses and swords dug out of a caliche bank near Tucson in 1924, inscribed in Latin and Hebrew with the history of a Roman colony in Arizona. There was nothing else in the ground. One of the swords has a dinosaur on it.
Why this verdict
Debunked by what was not in the ground with them: thirty-one inscribed lead objects and no pottery, no glass, no bone, no hearths — no trace of the settlement they were supposed to document — plus a Latin text assembled from a schoolbook and a dinosaur engraved on one of the swords.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That thirty-one lead objects — crosses, swords, spearheads and ceremonial items — found from 1924 near Picture Rocks, north-west of Tucson, are the relics of a Roman-Jewish colony called Calalus, established in Arizona in the eighth or ninth century, and that their rejection by professional archaeology represents an establishment refusing evidence that does not fit its chronology.
02Where it came from
Charles E. Manier found the first object embedded in a caliche bank in September 1924, and he and Thomas Bent, who acquired the land, recovered the rest over the following years. The objects bore Latin and Hebrew inscriptions, portraits, temple images and Roman numerals read as dates between 790 and 900. One carried the phrase rendered as 'Calalus, the unknown land', which supplied the colony with a name. Byron Cummings, the head of archaeology at the University of Arizona, initially supported them; the Smithsonian and most specialists did not.
03What the record shows
✕ DEBUNKED — Investigated and refuted. Here is what actually happened.
The decisive evidence is contextual and it is an absence. A settlement leaves debris — potsherds, broken glass, animal bone, charcoal, hearths, structures. The Silverbell Road site produced thirty-one inscribed lead objects and nothing else whatsoever. No occupation deposit of any kind has been found there before or since. Nothing in the material culture of the American Southwest in that period shows any Mediterranean contact.
The inscriptions fail on their own terms. The Latin is a pastiche whose phrasing and vocabulary track a nineteenth-century Latin grammar and dictionary rather than any Roman usage; passages have been matched to schoolbook sources. The Hebrew is similarly derivative. The mixture of Roman dating, Christian iconography and Jewish religious language corresponds to no textual tradition that has ever existed.
And there is a dinosaur engraved on the blade of one of the swords — an animal unknown to European scholarship until the 1820s. That single detail has been used by some later writers to argue for ancient knowledge of prehistoric animals, and by everyone else as the point at which the discussion ends. It has also supported the reading that the objects were made as a joke rather than as a fraud, by someone with access to popular history books and a foundry.
Metallurgical work on the lead has been attempted repeatedly and remains inconclusive because of contamination and inconsistent method — which is why the case rests on the archaeology and the philology, where it is not close.
04What it cost
The maker has never been identified, and the objects sit in the collection of the Arizona Historical Society. The Tucson artifacts belong to the same family as the Bat Creek Stone, the Newark Holy Stones and the Kensington Runestone: objects that relocate the deep history of the Americas to somebody who came from elsewhere. This archive records the family resemblance because it is the most consistent pattern in nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeological forgery, and because the appeal is not really about the artefact.