Transpacific contacts between eastern Asia and precolumbian Mesoamerica: an open question.

Abstract

Transpacific contacts between eastern Asia and precolumbian Mesoamerica are one of the big controversial issues in American archaeology. Oppositely to old and amateurish ideas on Egyptian or Phoenician travels to America, it broke out with scholarly status from comparative studies of similar iconographic and symbolic traits endeavored since 1950 by specialists of both areas. Notwithstanding lack of historical and archaeological evidences of contacts, several significant common elements suggest that they took place more than once, during the first millennium B.C. and the first millennium A.D.