Moontanman, on 11 July 2011 - 09:12 AM, said:
I'm not sure how difficult it would have been for Romans to get here as opposed to say Phoenicians, but as your link said the evidence for it is very weak. ...
i know i mentioned this before and i thought it was in this thread but we must have another somewhere on the topic.

anyways, for what it's worth here's some business on this business of romans in the americas.
Romans In Brazil During The Second Third Century?
robert marx said:
Ex-marine and underwater explorer/archaeologist/treasure-hunter Robert Marx states rather flatly:
Amongst my most notable discover[ies] was that of a 2nd century BC Roman shipwreck in the Bay of Guanabara, near Rio de Janeiro. This is a discovery that has received little to no examination, much less validation, from the realm of mainstream archaeology, no doubt in part because Marx is not a Ph.D. archaeologist. Scouring the web for more information about this finding, I did find a reference to the discovery in an article from Dr. Elizabeth Lyding Will, an expert on Roman amphoras (clay vessels used to store and ship goods during the Roman era). Dr. Will apparently has a piece of an amphora recovered from Marx's Brazil discovery. Of it, she says:
The highly publicized amphoras Robert Marx found in the ship are in fact similar in shape to jars produced in kilns at Kouass, on the west coast of Morocco. The Rio jars look to be late versions of those jars, perhaps datable to the third century A.D. I have a large piece of one of the Rio jars, but no labs I have consulted have any clay similar in composition. So the edges of the earth for Rome, beyond India and Scotland and eastern Europe, remain shrouded in mystery. Information about this find is practically non existent. Gary Fretz's synopsis of the "whole story" suggests that the find has been suppressed by the Brazilian government:
At the time the amphorae were confirmed to be "Roman", the large Italian faction in Brazil were extremely excited about this news. The Italian ambassador to Brazil notified the Brazilian government that, since the Romans were the first to "discover" Brazil, then all Italian immigrants should be granted immediate citizenship. There are a large number of Italian immigrants in Brazil and the government has created a tedious and costly citizenship application procedure for Italians that does not apply to Portuguese immigrants. The Brazilian government would not give in and the Italians in Brazil staged demonstrations. In response, the Brazilian government ordered all civilians off the recovery project and censored further news about the wreck hoping to diffuse the civil unrest. Finally, I've also seen mention of the following written works, which I've yet to dig up: Marx R.F., 1984 , Romans in Rio? [see Santarelli A. Mondo Sommerso 270 1983:252-3. Oceans, 17.4: 18-21.] The Romans in Rio book (?) is not among the works of Robert Marx as listed at Amazon. ...
from a link @ the previous link:
Tiny Roman Bust Shows Pre-Columbian Contact With Mexico
andrew collins said:
It was the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, who conducted the tests which determined the age of the bust. Afterwards art experts were more willing to accept that it was of Roman manufacture. Hristow who then checked original excavation reports and realised that the bust must have been buried at least nine years before the arrival in Mexico of Hernando Cortés in 1519.
Yet this realisation begs the real question of whether or not Roman explorers were making journeys to the Americas around AD 200.Betty Meggers, an anthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, has stated that: `I see no reason why ancient contact is not possible'.(4) She herself has made an extensive study of the similarities between the prehistoric pottery of the Joman culture of Japan and the Valdivia culture of Ecuador. This she believes is evidence of transpacific contact with the Americas as early as 3000 BC.