The site contains no other artifacts, no pottery sherds, no broken glass, no human or animal remains, and no sign of hearths or housing.
[3][1] On September 13, 1924, Charles Manier and his father stopped to examine some old lime kilns while driving northwest of Tucson on Silverbell Road.
[1][6] Quinlan also concluded that it would be easy to bury articles in the soft, silt material, and associated caliche in the lime kiln where the objects were found at the margin of prior trenches.
[1] Neil Merton Judd, curator of the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, happened to be in Tucson at the time of the discovery of the objects and, after examining them, also thought they were fakes, proposing that they may have been created by "some mentally incompetent individual with a flair for old Latin and the wars of antiquity.
He brought ten of the objects to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and showing them at museums and universities on the east coast.
[3] In 1975, Wake Forest University professor Cyclone Covey re-examined the controversy in his book titled Calalus: A Roman Jewish Colony in America from the Time of Charlemagne Through Alfred the Great.
[3] Covey's book proposes that the objects are from a Jewish settlement, founded by people who came from Rome and settled outside of present-day Tucson around 800 AD.
Bent wrote that a craftsman in the area had recalled the boy, his love for sculpture of soft metals and his collection of books on foreign languages, and told the excavators this.
[9][11] The Tucson artifacts were featured on The History Channel show America Unearthed in the episode titled "The Desert Cross," on February 22, 2013.
Surely this was the clever forgery of some learned cynic — something like the leaden crosses in New Mexico, which a jester once planted and pretended to discover as a relique of some forgotten Dark Age colony from Europe.