After a four-year hiatus, we are back with a new season of
America Unearthed and I am thrilled! Travel Channel has "resurrected" the show and put all their efforts behind us which we greatly appreciate. We come out of the gate at full speed investigating a cache of artifacts found decades ago in the desert outside of the geological paradise known as Sedona, Arizona. Even I was skeptical at first, but when the X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) testing came back with promising elemental results, and then ultimately they turned out to be authentic artifacts dating from the Roman era (3rd-4th Centuries) to the Viking era (10th to 11th Centuries), things got very interesting quickly. The big question was no longer about legitimacy of the artifacts, it was how did they get to the desert southwest, reportedly inside an old and rotting leather bag? There were really only two plausible possibilities; the collection of artifacts were left in the desert by someone, most likely a Scandinavian immigrant, in the late 19th, 20th, or early 21st Century, or somehow, a group of determined Viking era explorers made their way to what is now known as Arizona sometime in the 10th or 11th Centuries. When do you think the artifacts made it to Arizona?
The beautiful canyon at Slide Rock State Park which isn't too far from where the Viking artifacts were reportedly discovered near Sedona, Arizona.
Harry Atkins Jr. and Bonnie Engels take a selfie with me at Slide Rock State Park just after we tested the brass artifacts with the X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) gun.
Geologist/Geophysicist, Patrick Lehrmann, holds the steel bar he found with a metal detector we hoped was metal from a stranded Viking era ship that may have sailed here when the water of the Salton Sea covered this area roughly 1000 years ago.
Although we didn't find the legendary Viking ship, we did find the telltale evidence of a long lost Viking...
Author and historian, David Kier and I, pose for a selfie overlooking a gorgeous bay on the Pacific side of Baja, Mexico.
The Committee Films crew relax during a long day of filming in Baja, Mexico. L to R, Andy, Zak, Brandon, Jim, and Miranda.
This beautiful ship petroglyph, thought by archaeologists to be a one-thousand year-old in central Baja, Mexico, could be evidence of a Viking era ship seen by Native Americans a millennia ago.
I did my best to mimic a large saguaro cactus at the ship petroglyph site in Baja, Mexico.
