Twenty years or so ago it was reported in OMNI magazine that amphora from
Europe had been dredged out of the bay at Rio DE Janeiro I think. This was
part of another article that explained a large grant from GE had been
supplied to analyze and scan satellite imagery for archaeological sites in
the Mayan jungles the result of which was twenty-five or more possible sites
to explore. The amphora site was reported to have been covered by dredging by
the Brazilian government at the time and that avenue of research was
unfortunately discontinued, possibly it was from dredging from somewhere in
the port with "ballast"? Other precedents of this line of argument there has
been the reported so-called "Phoenician" pilot writing, a secret mariners
script used by their navigators that has been found at different sites along
the Brazilian coast. The fact is the script is there what it is is the
mystery. Please don't flame me for this post. I sat next to Anna Roosevelt,
at Forbes College at Princeton University, for a conference on "Computers and
Archaeology" many years ago it seems and the firm I worked for assisted her
in some the initial remote sensing and mapping in the Amazon River (amassonas
-- water that breaks boats) of the mound settlements there. She, the
granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, has been cited recently in the AAA
publication, "Complex Polities in the Ancient Tropical World," Bacus &
Lucero, editors. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological
Association Number 9 1999.

Another colleague of urban historical archaeology, last heard working on
Japanese archaeology sites as a photographer, catalogued Eleanor Roosevelt's
collection that she had acquired as gifts and purchases(?) during her travels
in South America. There was nothing in that collection, I think we would have
heard of it.

Maybe from what I've been reading, the artifact is a souvenir brought back in
a Mayan boat (traveled around Gulf of Mexico according to some) from a trip
to a peripatetic port or a place visited by a large floating piece of flotsam
and jetsam from an earthquake, those Nike shoes and rubber duckies sure
travel far.

Another colleague, Mary FitzHerbert (not the consort of a King) from Uruguay
and Penault, Wales, GB, worked on the preliminary archaeology of the Citibank
funded dam between Brazil and Uruguay completed by a US Fullbright scholar
and the Museum of Man in Paris, France. I do not remember the results of this
operation but who knows? First US Fullbright use of dogleashes to delineate
test excavations under dense mangrove like growth in the New World, maybe the
whole World and the introduction of monopole overhead photography that I know
of "down" there, ca. 1978 by the French.

There is famous park photograph in Montevideo, a small triangle surrounded by
impassable traffic, with room for one empty park-like bench in it. Can't
imaging a city without parks, not that that's the case there, just a
photograph. I think, however, the archaeological results were "expected," not
X-Files.

While working at Grossman & Associates I worked with a Mexican urban
archaeologist for about five years, Victor Ortiz. His wife has a Wenner Gren
grant to study the politics of Mexico City for her Ph.D. I'm not sure if I
should believe he's eaten jaguar, I'm sure he'd have told us if anything
Roman had been found in his experience. I hope he enjoyed our view of the
"History of Mexico" textbook from a class I took of the same name. They
worked on two sites in Puerto Rico, and I'm sure if something Roman was found
there we would have heard of it too.

I guess we should think sometimes of ancient archaeologists. Whose kingdom
would not want the support of history to back its policies and culture? Adolf
Hitler tried and got the "Beaker Culture" which he tried to suppress because
it did not fit his conception of the predecessors to the Reich. I have read
it was some of the best archaeology done at the time. Perhaps, other cultures
antiquarians carry around the artifacts of the past and examine the record
for clues and hints to the unseen part of the present needing understanding
in the best case, the worst, the burial of scholars for their findings, such
has occurred to some Confucians, perhaps, though only one of the five great
books survived the "Great Fire." Possibly the motivation was certain
practices. I read that it was a policy at a point in time to confiscate all
books arriving in Alexandria for the library, this surely might have the
opposite effect, causing a greater search for explanation and knowledge,
although I highly doubt it was the motive, or was it?

George Myers