Ancient coins found in America - Part 1

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The following is from the book "Legend and Lore of the Americas before
1492" by Ronald H. Fritz.

Forty-one reports document the finding of Old World coins with
pre-Columbian dates in the Americas, particularly North America,
and their may be others. This evidence is used to argue for
pre-Columbian visits by Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks
Romans, and Norse sailors, although only the Norse find stands up
to scholarly scrutiny.
In 1553 Lucio Marineo Siculo (1460-1533), a somewhat credulous Italian
humanist, reported the finding of a Roman coin from the time of
Caesar Augustus in a gold mine in Panama. He concluded that its
presence proved the Romans had reached the America before the
Spanish. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes touched on Siculo's
story in his "Historia general y natural de las Indias" of 1535 and showed
that is was ridiculous. Significantly, no one found any more pre-
Columbian coins in the Americas until several Roman coins from the
Imperial era turned up in the Fayetteville area of Tennessee between
1818 and 1823. The early archaeologist Caleb Atwater was immediately
skeptical and suspected that the coins were deliberate plants.
Tennessee antiquarian John Haywood considered the find authentic, but
even he reported that after a certain Mr. Colter (a man known to possess
Roman coins) left Tennessee for Alabama in 1823, no more coins were
found in Tennessee. Modern archaeologists generally agree with Atwater's
original assessment, and think the Tennessee coins were a hoax.
Only one other documented coin find took place in the nineteenth
century. In 1880 on an Illinois farm a Seleucid Greek coin from around
173-64 B.C. was found. The remaining 32 finds took place in the
twentieth century; of that number, 24 were found after 1945. With the
exception of the Norse penny found in Maine, these coins appear to have
been brought to the Americas after 1492. Some coins turned out to be
forgeries, such as the three Bar Kolchba coins found in Kentucky in
1932, 1952 and 1967. Other finds are poorly documented. Staunch
diffusionists Constance Irwin and Cyrus Gordon reported the finding of a
massive cache of Roman coins in Venezuela containing some ninth-
century Arabic coins. They claim that Mendel Peterson of the Smithsonian
Institution is preparing a study of this Venezuelan find, but their claims
are 20 and 30 years old and no such study has appeared. Perhaps the
Venezuelan coin find was an archaeological will-o'-the wisp.

Part 2 on Friday.