Very interesting, thank you for a great post. Can I be put on the list for such articles? My view was that during the Bronze age the quest for rare tin maybe allowed for world exploration and maybe the bronze age people explored the world, including the Americas. That made sense to me because there was a financial reason to explore.
Beu when iron replaced bronze the market for bronze collapsed and there was no more need to explore or circumnavigate the globe. Over time this world knowledge - which was secret to begin with because it was a trade secret passed down father to son probably - was forgotten.
I’ll add you to the ping list, if nothing gets pinged in the next couple of days (really, in the next 8 hours), send me a private message as a reminder, or even do it now, I’ll see it right away when I’m back where I keep the list. :’)
I’d love it if the massive copper deposits of the far north of Michigan turned out to have been exploited by ancient “Old World” groups, but I don’t find that compelling. If there were an ancient wreck, that would be great; I’m not sure those currently wreck-mapping and such would notice something that anomalous. I could understand how the copper might have made it to the “Old World” via middlemen, that’s how it reached Central and South America.
Another obstacle is the waterway — there’s at least two places which would require portaging, or moving cargo from ship to carts, carts back to ships, again, middlemen.
I think reason the Phoenicians and Mycenaeans were credited with Stonehenge (for example) is that they were newly of interest perhaps 120 years ago, when there was a revival of interest in PreColumbian antiquities, while there was barely any study of or awareness of city-building by the ancestors of the locals. Now that the Mayan text is being read, there’s been an uptick in interest in Mayan stuff, and perhaps that’s why there’s a claim out there that the Mayans had colonized in at least one place in North America.