Archaeology and the Book of Mormon

A secondary storyline discusses the Jaredite nation, which the Book of Mormon describes as coming from the Old World shortly after the Biblical confounding of the languages at the Tower of Babel via a miraculous transoceanic voyage.

The orthodox view remains dominant in the Latter Day Saint movement, though in recent decades, various individuals and groups have begun to describe the work as "inspired" rather than asserting the book to be literal account of history.

Since the book's publication in 1830, Mormon archaeologists have been trying to confirm the veracity of the narratives, but have repeatedly retreated from prior hypotheses to account for overwhelming archeological evidence.

[29] Archaeological evidence of pre-Clovis people points to the South Carolina Topper Site being 16,000 years old, at a time when the glacial maximum would have theoretically allowed for lower coastlines.

As with European colonialism, American manifest destiny relied on the moral and legal premise that colonization was permissible so long as the displaced natives were uncivilized.

Note that similar speculation occurred earlier in Spanish-speaking regions of the Western Hemisphere, but these had little influence on the Mound Builder myth due to a lack of available translations.

[42] Smith and many of his followers thought that the Jaredites, Nephites, and Lamanites were inhabitants of the ancient Americas in what is today called the hemispheric geography model by Mormon apologists.

For example, during a trek through Illinois, Joseph Smith stated he and his travelling group were "wandering over the plains of the Nephites, recounting occasionally the history of the Book of Mormon, roving over the mounds of that once beloved people of the Lord, picking up their skulls & their bones, as proof of its divine authenticity".

Other critiques include the fact that kmown Mesoamerican cities lack earthwork fortifications as described in the Book of Mormon as well as direct statements by Smith that locate Nephite lands in the Midwest.

Such civilizations left numerous artifacts in the form of hewn stone ruins, tombs, temples, pyramids, roads, arches, walls, frescos, statues, vases, and coins.

These relate to artifacts, animal, plant, or technology that critics believe did not exist in the Americas during the Book of Mormon time period (before 2500 BC to about 400 AD).

The Book of Mormon mentions horses in five incidences, and are portrayed as being in the forest upon first arrival of the Nephites, "raise(d)", "fed", "prepared" (in conjunction with chariots), used for food, and being "useful unto man".

[79] Some amateur archaeologists and Mormon authors have cited controversial evidence that North American mound builder cultures were familiar with the elephant.

This evidence has long been a topic of debate with modern archaeologists concluding that the elephantine remains were improperly dated, misidentified, or openly fraudulent.

Mormon Apologist Matthew Roper has countered these claims, pointing out that 16th-century Spanish friars used the word "goat" to refer to native Mesoamerican brocket deer.

[98] Apologists note that peccaries (also known as javelinas), which bear a resemblance to pigs and are in the same subfamily Suinae as swine, have been present in South America since prehistoric times.

[107] The Book of Mormon claims that non-specific "seeds" were brought from the land of Jerusalem and planted on arrival in the New World and produced a successful yield.

Mormon scholar John L. Sorenson documents several materials which were used in Mesoamerica to make fine cloth equivalent to silk, some of which the Spanish actually called "silk" upon their arrival, including the fiber (kapok) from the seed pods of the ceiba tree, the cocoons of wild moths, the fibers of silkgrass (Achmea magdalenae), the leaves of the wild pineapple plant, and the fine hair of the underbelly of rabbits.

Clark Wissler, the Curator of Ethnography at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, noted: "we see that the prevailing mode of land transport in the New World was by human carrier.

Not surprisingly due to the material properties of pure copper, bladed tools were rare, though a few examples have been recovered on Isle Royale and around Lake Superior.

[127][128] Mesoamerican cultures began extracting copper ore and smelting it 1400 years ago, including independently discovering the lost-wax casting method.

The Inca Empire independently discovered how to smelt and alloy copper into bronze, which it worked into a wide range of tools, including bolas, plumb bobs, chisels, gravers, pry bars, tweezers, needles, plates, fish hooks, spatulas, ladles, knives (tumi), bells, breastplates, lime spoons, mace heads, ear spools, bowls, cloak pins (tupus), axes, and foot plow adzes.

No inscriptions using Old World forms of writing have been shown to have occurred in any part of the Americas before 1492 except for a few Norse rune stones which have been found in Greenland.

[148] In the early 1840s, John Lloyd Stephens' two-volume work Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan was seen by some church members as an essential guide to the ruins of Book of Mormon cities.

[153] The results of these and other investigations, while producing valuable archaeological data, have not led to any widespread acceptance by non-Mormon archaeologists of the Book of Mormon account.

[155] Replying to Hougey, as well as other secular and non-secular requests, Ferguson wrote in a letter dated 5 June 1972: "Ten years have passed ….

An example of the mainstream archaeological opinion of Mormon archaeology is summarized by historian and journalist Hampton Sides: Yale's Michael Coe likes to talk about what he calls "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," the tendency among Mormon theorists like Sorenson to keep the discussion trained on all sorts of extraneous subtopics … while avoiding what is most obvious: that Joseph Smith probably meant "horse" when he wrote down the word "horse".

In the essay on DNA studies, the church argues for "a more careful approach to the data," and states that "much work remains to be done to fully understand the origins of the native populations of the Americas."

[166] In the early 1950s, M. Wells Jakeman of the BYU Department of Archaeology suggested that a complicated scene carved on Stela 5 in Izapa was a depiction of a Book of Mormon event called "Lehi's dream", which features a vision of the tree of life.

[168] Julia Guernsey Kappelman, author of a definitive work on Izapan culture, finds that Jakeman's research "belies an obvious religious agenda that ignored Izapa Stela 5's heritage".