The Tucson Artifacts Hoax

This is the story of how a family outing turned into the discovery of over 30 artifacts–most of them made of lead–that some people think demonstrate the existence of a Roman settlement in the Tucson area around 775-900 CE.

In the sun-baked desert landscape of 1920s Tucson, Arizona, a family went for a drive on Silverbell Road leading northwest out of town then stopped at an old lime kiln for a look around. Even in 1924–a hundred years ago–this was an old site. It was probably built in the late 1800s then abandoned decades before this family outing. One that turned into a historical puzzle that some folks are still debating even today. 

Charles Minear, along with his wife, daughter, and father stopped along this road that wouldn’t even be paved for many years to come. It was September 13th, but make no mistake, they weren’t enjoying the fall weather. The high for that day was 100 degrees Fahrenheit (almost 38 C). Until 2020, Tucson’s low rainfall record was 5.07 inches that year in 1924.

You also didn’t do an outing like this in an air-conditioned sedan. Your Ford Model T might have been cooled a little with a block of dry ice that you picked up at the gas station and had installed in a special bracket in the floorboard of the car.

So what made this family outing special?

While poking around the old lime kiln, Manier’s father noticed a piece of metal sticking out of the ground near the kiln. So Manier went to the car and grabbed a pick and a shovel he had in the trunk then the pair used them to excavate a 17.5 inch tall lead cross that was stuck in a caliche layer 65 inches deep.

The reason it was spotted is because the ground was cut away between the kiln and the road, leaving a steep bank with visible stratigraphy. 

Long story short, the Manier family took the cross home, cleaned it up, and noticed that it appeared to be two pieces stuck together. Prying them apart, they found inscriptions inside on both pieces.

As it happens, a neighbor of the Minears was the wife of Professor A.F. Kinnison from the University of Arizona and she knew a Latin inscription when she saw one. So off to the University the artifacts went. A waxy substance found between the two halves was reported to be a petroleum by-product, but ended up tossed out by accident. But a date initially translated from the text was 800 CE.

Manier joined forces with Thomas Bent and together they excavated over 30 more artifacts from the site. Many of the artifacts had inscriptions so they enlisted the help of Laura Ostrander who helped translate and sketch them. It was Ostrander who revealed the story of Calalus, a Roman settlement in what is now Tucson, Arizona but existed between 775 and 900 CE. According to the inscriptions.

Along with the lead artifacts (crosses, swords, spears, and a fan-shaped object), a 12” caliche plaque was recovered. On it were “crudely drawn heads and several inscriptions” (Burgess 2009). 

Caliche is a calcium carbonate soil layer that forms in arid or desert regions due to a variety of reasons. Plant roots can release carbon dioxide that leaches down to lower levels of soil with light rainfall–too much leaches the calcium from the soil completely. Or it can form with water being pulled up through capillary action, precipitating minerals like calcium near the surface.
Either way, the process is slow and takes thousands, if not many thousands, of years.

The Archaeological Context 

The site itself was 7 or 8 miles outside of 1924 Tucson along Silverbell road which runs parallel to the Santa Cruz River on its west bank. It was situated in an embankment west of the road which was sheared off facing the east at the location of a late 1800s lime kiln.

All the 32 total  artifacts were made of lead except the caliche plaque:

• 8 crosses 
• 9 swords (whole or pieces)
• 13 spears (whole or pieces)
• 1 paddle or fan
• 1 caliche tablet

Though the artifacts were in the form of swords and spears, they were not actual weapons due to their weight and the nature of the material. Lead is not a metal that can be sharpened or expected to hold an edge.

There were a variety of damage, tool marks, nicks, and breaks to the artifacts. None were consistent with damage one might expect from a battle or normal use.

There were no artifacts or features located that indicated habitation, dwelling, or even a camp. No foundations, stone walls, household items, ceramics, bones, hearths, or even charcoal from a campfire. No middens or trash. No sign that anyone was in the area aside from the late 1800s lime kiln.

The artifacts were scattered as opposed to a central location as one finds with caches of hunting weapons (eg. the Wenatchee Clovis cache) or with religious or ceremonial items (eg. Cucuteni-Trypillia figurine caches in Europe).

The stratigraphic context of the artifact finds is interesting. They were found at depths ranging from 54 to 78 inches. The stratigraphy of the region includes layers of gravel, sand, and silt from a Pleistocene alluvial fan older than 10,000 years BP. The caliche layer was between 48 and 72 inches below the surface and many of the artifacts were in or through this layer.

The Inscriptions

Inscribed on the bottom portion of the first cross, and translated from Latin, found was:

We are carried north over the sea to Calalus an unknown land where people were ruling widely. The Toltesus were lead over the wooded land. Theodorus brings up his forces the city Rhodda and more than seven hundred are captured. No gold shall be taken from the city. Theodorus a man of great courage rules fourteen years James rules six years. With God’s help there is nothing to be afraid of. In the name of Israel. James renews the city. With God’s help James rules with mighty hand in the manner of his ancestors. Sing to the Lord. May his fame last forever.

On the upper half of this cross were the Latin words for, “In Memoriam Councils of great cities with seven hundred soldiers A.D. 800–Jan.” Below these words on two lines were the incised drawings of 3 people. 

Above and below the first person (left lobe of the cross) were the words “Britannia,” “Albion,” and “Jacobus.” 

Above and below the second person (center): “Romani,” “Aetius,” and “Theodorus.”

Above and below the third person (right lobe): “Gaul,” “Seine,” and “Israel.”

Several of the other artifacts had incised words and images as well. One of the crosses had a serpent entwining it with a Latin inscription that describes coming from Rome to Calalus in 775 CE. This cross also had a short Hebrew inscription. A cross bearing a crescent at the top included images of angels and Masonic symbols along with an inscription also in Hebrew.

Even the caliche plaque had an inscription, but this one in Latin: “Here lies Theodore. Anno Domini 800.” along with a very simple incised image of a man, ostensibly Theodore himself.

Beliefs Surrounding the Artifacts

Charles Manier along with Thomas Bent, who partnered with Manier early on, believed these artifacts were proof positive that a Roman-Jewish settlement existed in Arizona. They pointed to the inscriptions, which were in both Latin and Hebrew, and the fact that they were in or beyond the caliche layer, which takes a long time to form, thus supporting the great age of the lead objects. Their translator, high school history teacher Laura Ostrander certainly supported this notion as she translated the inscriptions and ultimately reported her work to the press, saying that there was a Roman-Jewish presence in the Americas before Columbus.

Geologist Clifton Sarle also worked with Ostrander to promote the artifacts as genuine during the 1920s. He insisted that the caliche formed around the artifacts over the course of many hundreds of years and even hypothesized the route that Roman Jews might have used via Mexico to the Santa Cruz River and finally to Tucson.

Then there was Byron Cummings, the director at the Arizona State Museum. He initially supported the authenticity of the artifacts shortly after they were discovered and even presented some of them at a conference for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. However, he later revised his opinion to that of a skeptical one.

Even today, there are those that still profess the artifacts to be genuine creations of Roman Jews from the 8th century CE. American genealogist Donald Yates and calligrapher-photographer Robert Hyde self-published a coffee table book, The Tucson Artifacts: An Album of Photography With Transcriptions and Translations of the Medieval Latin (2017). 

Yates also self-published Merchant Adventurer Kings of Rhoda: The Lost World of the Tucson Artifacts, in which he describes what he believes to be “a forgotten Roman-styled military governorship in Chichimec Toltec Northwest Mexico.” I purchased the former, but not the latter as yet. I may end up dropping 10 bucks for the Kindle version some day, but I just purchased the other one to see additional photos of the artifacts. 

Early Skepticism

Almost right away, experts were shaking their heads at the authenticity of the Tucson Artifacts. One of them was Bashford Dean, curator of arms and armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET). Another was Neil Judd, curator of the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution. Between them, they took issue with the crude nature of the artifacts and that the Latin inscriptions were quotes from well-known classical authors like Cicero and Virgil. 

Much like the Kensington Rune Stone, faked in Minnesota just a couple decades earlier, someone appeared to use language textbooks and readers to form believable inscriptions. Dean and Judd also took issue with the use of “Anno Domini” or “AD,” which wasn’t widely used until the 9th century CE, though it was invented in the 6th and first used in the 8th.

Modern Skepticism

There are some really good reasons why these are probably fakes. Among them are the concerns raised by Dean and Judd in the 1920s. The inscriptions are straight out of Latin grammar books. The English word “Gaul,” found on Artifact 1, the first cross discovered by the Manier family, was not adopted from its French origin, Gaule, until around the 1560s.

Another problem is the metallurgy. The lead used in the artifacts was described as “type metal,” which is an alloy mostly of lead that includes antimony and tin and used primarily for creating 19th and 20th century print type-faces. The antimony imparts a toughness to the lead as does the tin, which also gives it a bit more fluidity when pouring into a small mold. 

The original assay was done by Thomas Chapman in 1929 and he concluded the sample he was given to be a “synthetic lead-antimony alloy usually having the trade name of ‘Type Metal’ and the alloy was produced in comparatively recent times” (Burgess 2009).

The archaeological context and the assemblage itself is also a significant problem. The inscriptions would, taken at face value, lead one to believe there were hundreds of people living in a Roman settlement in or around modern Tucson. For nearly 100 years or more. And yet the only sign of this colony, settlement, or community are 31 lead artifacts and a modified chunk of caliche.

There are no foundations, living spaces, tools, ceramics, household items, coprolites, burials, bodies, or  anything beyond the 32 artifacts found near an abandoned lime kiln. This is not an insignificant observation. Archaeologists routinely locate very ephemeral sites with just a scant few artifacts to point the way. We’ve been able to detect people in the Americas going back to at least 22,000 years.

Probably the single most damning piece of evidence suggesting that these are faked artifacts is the presence of a dinosaur on one of the swords! It’s important to note that both the brontosaurus and the diplodocus were discovered in the 1870s as part of the Bone Wars. This was a ruthless pursuit by paleontologists to find dinosaur fossils, but it mostly involved Edward Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences and Charles Marsh of Yale’s Peabody Museum. 

This “war” ended in the financial ruin of both men but between them they discovered over 135 new dinosaur species, boosting paleontological research as a sudden rise in popular culture by the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. Charles R. Knight, a famous paleoartist created detailed paintings of dinosaurs like brontosaurus as early as 1897. And the New York Tribune and the New York Journal had images of brontosaurus on their front pages in 1904 and 1898 respectively. 

Brontosaurus was all the rage beginning in the 1870s when it was discovered. They were even a popular subject in the early 1800s  But there were no dinosaurs alive in Roman times. Nor did Romans know of dinosaurs. 

But what about that caliche? 

Early believers thought that since most or all of the artifacts were in or below this layer, that this meant they were of great enough age to be Roman. After all, it took hundreds of years to create.

As it turns out, the caliche layer that the artifacts were associated with dates back to the Pleistocene. Over 10,000 years BP in fact. This means that the “Romans” would need to have been in Arizona before Rome was even in its Neolithic period. That rules out Romans. 

What’s the Real Story of the Artifacts?

There are a lot of reasons why we can conclude they’re a hoax or at least not authentic to a Roman settlement. They’re a modern alloy of lead and antimony. They were found in or beyond a geologic stratum that dates to over 10,000 BP, perhaps placed there intentionally to signal their great age not knowing how great it would turn out to be. 

In addition, they have inscriptions of phrases found in modern Latin grammar books. The use of “Anno Domini” was too early for the claimed date. The use of “Gaul” was too early for the claimed date. There exists no historical or archaeological context for the artifacts (living spaces, domestic items, interred members of the community, trash middens, etc.). One of them has a 10 million year old dinosaur incised on it, a dinosaur not known until the late 1800s!

But who could have perpetrated such a hoax, assuming they were not the work of some modern hobbyist who simply disposed of them only to be discovered and misunderstood at some later time?

The obvious culprits are the discoverers. Perhaps Charles Manier and geologist Clifton Sarle were behind it all. There was, after all, a letter from Bessie Manier (Charles’ wife) in the 1970s that included a supposed written confession from Charles and Clifton Sarle admitting that they created the artifacts. But this letter and confession are widely discounted because the confession itself is in Bessie’s handwriting. 

Though it is, perhaps, possible that she reproduced the confession, took it as dictation, or simply knew of the hoax and forged the confession to clear the air. Or maybe she just felt like implicating her dead husband to the widow of his friend and invented the confession from whole cloth.

There was also suspicion that the artifacts were created by a gentleman named Daniel Soper, who moved to Arizona from Michigan where he was caught making fake artifacts around the turn of the century. By 1908, Soper had gone from creating unbaked clay objects with fake hieroglyphs to pieces made of copper. The artifacts, created to confirm biblical events like Noah’s flood, were found within Indian mounds in Michigan. He moved to Arizona after being found out, planted some of his leftover forgeries there, but was unable to fool the locals. His artifacts were too dissimilar to the Silverbell pieces, however.

The Mormons initially expressed an interest in the Silverbell artifacts of Tucson which led some to believe they may be the fraudsters responsible, but the dates of the artifacts didn’t line up with any of their conclusions, so they withdrew their interest.

Another potential creator that I find intriguing is a guy named Timoteo Odohul. He was a local Mexican sculptor who resided near the lime kiln in the 1880s and known to work with lead as a medium. The story was told by a retired rancher to a local newspaper who described Odohul as a young man that lived with his parents at the lime kiln 40 years prior to Manier’s discovery, that he worked with soft metals, and that he owned an extensive library of foreign language books. The recollection by the rancher was supported by a second man who recalled that the Odohul family was cultured, educated and possessed a library full of the classics in literature.

What Should We Take Away from the Story?

As of right now, the artifacts are with the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson. And if they’re not a hoax, it’s because someone found them and misunderstood their context. But, more importantly, they’re part of the history of Tucson and the culture of that place in time and space. Dinosaurs, scientific discoveries, and tales of far away expeditions were capturing the imaginations of an all too eager public–Howard Carter unlocked the intact tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun just a couple years prior to the Tucson artifacts story. 

Perhaps the creators of the crosses and swords of Silverbell road wanted to feel the excitement and limelight of such a discovery. Or maybe, there in the record setting heat of 1924 Tucson, Arizona, someone wanted to leave their mark in history. 

They may not be genuine artifacts of the Roman era, evidence of a Roman-Jewish colony in the wilds of the North American southwest, but the story is one of intrigue and mystery. Maybe not the mystery of pre-Columbian contact, but certainly one of motivation and personality. And these artifacts are now a part of history. Even pseudoarchaeology can find its value in a historical narrative.

If you want to read more, I highly recommend the article by Don Burgess (2009) in the Journal of the Southwest, another by J. Micheal Hunter (2005) in the Journal of Mormon History, as well as the Arizona Highways article by Leo W. Banks (2002), all listed in the further reading section below. I gathered most of this information from these articles and there is so much more that I didn’t cover.

Further Reading and References

Banks, Leo (2002). Unearthing a Mystery: Ancient Roman Relics or 18th Century Hoax? Arizona Highways, 78(9), 34-37.

Burgess, Don. “Romans in Tucson? The Story of an Archaeological Hoax.” Journal of the Southwest, 51(1), 3-102.

Hunter, J. Michael (2005). The Kinderhook Plates, the Tucson Artifacts, and Mormon Archaeological Zeal. Journal of Mormon History, 31(1), 31-70.

Yates, Donald N. (2017). The Tucson Artifacts: An Album of Photography with Transcriptions and Translations of the Medieval Latin. Self-Published Via Blurb.

Special Notes

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