I had a flash of imagination:
An alternate crazy emperor setting out to build a Via Atlantica across the ocean.
An alternate crazy emperor setting out to build a Via Atlantica across the ocean.
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.
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.
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 borderSo 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