Personally, I would not be surprised one bit if real Roman artefacts were found on the shores of North America one day - but it would not change history one bit.
"Discovering" a new land and exploiting it requires travels in both direction, so you report the discovery and mount an effort to go again and explore. It does not include accidentally ending up there - stuck.
And it is this second way of arriving in the New World I have in mind for the Romans. They travelled regularly out of the Strait of Gibraltar, along the Spanish and French coasts and up to England. It is simple logic to think that some of that traffic was caught off guard by storms. Many of them were never seen again, I am sure. Most simply sank, but a few must have survived the storm, but found themselves out of sight from the coasts, disoriented (you only navigated by sight in those days, unless you were Phoenician and in on the secret of compass) and after many days, found themselves on the Coast of North America, but never to return to Rome to report the discovery (as they would not have known how).
Doesn't mean that the Crazies that are obsessed with Oak Island haven't faked this, though. :christmas happy:
After all,some of you may remember that in 1947, some scientists proved that the Mayan culture could have arisen from the Egyptians (there are many similarities in beliefs and things like astronomy and pyramids, etc) when they crossed the ocean on a raft made of papyrus, the Kon Tiki. Of course, the original idea with the Kon Tiki was to prove that Polynesia could have been discovered and developed by the by the Mayans, not the other way around, but it worked both ways for the real scientists.
