The figurine was dug up, hmm, I'd have to look that up, but it was quiite a while ago, maybe first half of the 20th c, in a PreColumbian burial; it was given the brush-off I believe for many years, then someone with some intellectual curiousity happened to spot it and figure out that it was "old world". There are of course the knee-jerk response crowd, so-called skeptics who are actually true believers, who rejected the idea immediately. Clearly though, a piece of carved stone didn't float across the Atlantic. My personal favorite is how a working vessel isn't allowed to cross the ocean, but a "wreck" somehow can make it all the way, despite the fact that wrecks generally wind up on the bottom. :')
The Brazilian find was made forty years ago or thereabouts, by Robert Marx, who's a great diver (or was) but without academic credentials. Since "academice credentials" means, in part, indoctrination into the nonsense of isolationism, it's difficult at best to find someone who will dive in a remote location as in where the ancient (?) wreck was found near the coast of Brazil.
In 1976, diver Jose Roberto Texeira salvaged two intact amphorae from the bottom of Guanabara Bay, 15 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro. Six years later, archeologist Robert Marx found thousands of pottery fragments in the same locality, including 200 necks from amphorae.
Amphorae are tall storage vessels that were used widely throughout ancient Europe. These particular amphorae are of Roman manufacture, circa the second century B.C. Much controversy erupted around the finds because Spain and Portugal both claim to have discovered Brazil around 1500 A.D. Roman artifacts were distinctly unwelcome. More objectively, the thought of an ancient Roman crossing of the Atlantic is not so farfetched. Roman wrecks have been discovered in the Azores; and the shortest way across the Atlantic is from Africa to Brazil -- only 18 days using modern sailing vessels. [Science Frontiers, No. 28: Jul-Aug 1983; Photo from Professor Legner Faculty Homepages]
- The Roman Amphora -- Learning from Storage Jars by Elizabeth Lyding Will
Just how far did the Romans go? Is there a Roman ship off the Azores, as some say? Are there thousands of Phoenician and Roman amphora fragments on Salt Island in the Cape Verdes, as reported by the underwater salvor Robert Marx? Is the "Rio Wreck," at the bottom of Guanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a Roman ship that in ancient times was blown off course?
Twice a year London's Sunday Times phones me to ask if I know anything more about the Rio Wreck. The highly publicized amphoras Robert Marx found in the ship are in fact similar in shape to jars produced in kilns at Kouass, on the west coast of Morocco. The Rio jars look to be late versions of those jars, perhaps datable to the third century A.D. I have a large piece of one of the Rio jars, but no labs I have consulted have any clay similar in composition. So the edges of the earth for Rome, beyond India and Scotland and eastern Europe, remain shrouded in mystery.