How might Roman America look?

This more or less leads to the question which places are naturally desrtined to see development into trade and transport nexuses. Even when downplaying the important question "are there mighty and wealthy native empires in the hinterland?"

Of course, anything we know amout american libguistics will be changed massively. In the South East of TTL's US, there will be no Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek as we know them as the PoD is long before there assumed ethnogenesis.

Near the mouth of a big river, often as far as tides will go, is an rather obvious place since it opens up the possibility of boat travel, which will be cheaper than building roads. This of course assumes that a) something is upriver that is fit for trading and b) there is no huge wafterfall making river travel impoossible.

So there will be probably be a port city near New Orleans or whereever the Mississippi had its mouth in the early first millenium.


How navigable would the Mississippi be to vessels of the Roman period?

I was under the impression that it was so fast-flowing that it was difficult for sailing vessels to go upriver.


On the Eastern Seaboard, the entrance Chesapeake Bay seems like a natural place for at least one bigger settlement. The site of Charleston, SC as well. New York Harbor, too.
Is Veracruz in Mexico at a netural harbor? I do not know. Neither which places in the Caribbean are privileged by nature and which were chosen more randomly.

I doubt if they'll do much at Chesapeake or NY. Even the European discoverers didn't for many generations. And even in Europe, the Romans didn't bother much with thinly populated areas like Arabia or the Scottish Highlands. Like the Conquistadores later, they went for places with lots of enslavable natives.

So Roman America will be pretty much where Spanish America was OTL - if it was then densely populated enough to make it worth Rome's while.
 
It'd look totally parched and starved, for the survivor would get there by cannibalism. And have to join a local tribe to survive instead of getting to start their own. That's because they carried little food and water and mostly depended on local markets, like most of the Med. That has to've happened several times. And they'd be lost, for they only went out of sight of land rarely and quickly.

After all, learning and doing colonization's VAST work. WHY when they had EVERYTHING RIGHT HERE, including settler space. It was small Portugal that did the heavy lifting, for a reason.....

Sorry.
 
So Roman America will be pretty much where Spanish America was OTL - if it was then densely populated enough to make it worth Rome's while.
actually, depending on when we're talking, the Romans could encounter and focus on the mound-building culture that occupied the Mississippi basin (i forget the culture's name, but their largest city was called Cahokia). i imagine they'd eventually focus on the predecessors of the Aztecs, but who knows when that would actually happen? furthermore, we shouldn't assume that the Romans could automatically land right at the same area as the Spanish did--they could very well end up around OTL's mid-Atlantic states, or around the Georgia-Florida border
 
actually, depending on when we're talking, the Romans could encounter and focus on the mound-building culture that occupied the Mississippi basin (i forget the culture's name, but their largest city was called Cahokia). i imagine they'd eventually focus on the predecessors of the Aztecs, but who knows when that would actually happen? furthermore, we shouldn't assume that the Romans could automatically land right at the same area as the Spanish did--they could very well end up around OTL's mid-Atlantic states, or around the Georgia-Florida border

But if they did, would they see such thinly-populated regions as worth bothering with? Even OTL, it was a century after Columbus before a successful colony was planted anywhere north of Florida. And the Romans never even bothered with Ireland, which was a lot nearer.

And if you start from the Mediterranean, I think the wind system is liable to take you toward the Caribbean, or even possibly Brazil, rather than North America.
 

jahenders

Banned
If the Romans had a bit more success in conquering England, such that they could take all through Scotland and not had to maintain a border, they might have looked to Ireland. If they had gone that way, they might have taken Ireland fairly handily.

So, if all that happens, they might theoretically develop an interest (and techniques) to sail West (like the Vikings did), perhaps lured by legends of "Golden lands."

In any case, assuming that all somehow happened, they could potentially visit some of the same areas the vikings later did. However, the only thing I can see tempting them to establishing a colony is if they had some plan to explore there further.

If they did somehow establish a self-sustaining colony (a fishing village), they'd almost certainly become a "lost colony" when the Romans pulled out of Britain, if not before.
 
I'm imagining the antebellum South of OTL with a much more diverse slave population and more manumission.

Assuming, of course, it doesn't end up becoming a "lost colony" that gets assimilated by much larger native populations.
 
Top