Ancient Scriptures: The Book of Mormon: Archeology

The Book of Mormon was the last thread of my faith that I clung to after my belief in so many other parts of the church was shattered. I didn't think that there was any way that Joseph could have produced the book without divine help. I thought that it had essentially been proven ancient by church scholars. Once I opened my mind enough to ask questions though, this last thread of faith quickly snapped.

A major problem confronting a believer in historicity of the Book of Mormon is the large amount of evidence against the existence of Book of Mormon civilizations in the Western hemisphere. There is so much out there that I can only present an outline of the archeological problems that plague the Book of Mormon. An obvious issue is metallurgy. We read that many wars were fought using steel swords, some of which were patterned after the sword of Laban. Yet no metal swords whatsoever existed in any of the places where people think the events in the Book of Mormon took place, except Jerusalem. There were no metal swords before Columbus in Mesoamerica, North America, or South America. Metallurgy in these areas either did not exist or was not sophisticated enough to create such swords, not to mention steel. At the time, these civilizations also did not use copper and brass breastplates such as those mentioned in the Book of Mormon (Mosiah 8:10).

And yet the Book of Mormon gives accounts of large civilizations using swords for thousands of years. Millions of warriors were involved in some of the battles described in the Book of Mormon and many of them were supposed to have had swords. For example, the Nephites found the rusting swords of the Jaredites, left from one of the great battles that destroyed the Jaredite civilization (Mosiah 8:11). No evidence for anything like that exists in the Western Hemisphere. Ancient Americans had clubs with obsidian blades. Some apologists have tried to say that Nephites had swords at first, and that somehow as their civilization developed their ability to make metal swords declined and they resorted primarily to wood and obsidian, which then were also called swords in the Nephite record. (For example, BYU anthropologist John Sorenson writes: "...Laban's weapon was replicated in function and general pattern, but different material could have been used for the new weapons ([Deanne] Matheny offers helpful citations [Matheny 1993] on the use of hard wooden "swords" in Mesoamerica). The copies might have been of metal, but need not have been" (Sorenson 1994). The problem with this ad hoc explanation is that there is no indication of this in the book. For example, Nephites found the rusting swords of the dead Jaredites, identified them as swords and didn't seem to think that such metal swords were unusual. According to the book, the Jaredites were producing steel swords on the American continent for about 2000 years. Also, in the account of the Anti-Nephi-Lehies, we read what appears to be a reference to metal swords:

Now, my best beloved brethren, since God hath taken away our stains, and our swords have become bright, then let us stain our swords no more with the blood of our brethren. Behold, I say unto you, Nay, let us retain our swords that they be not stained with the blood of our brethren; for perhaps, if we should stain our swords again they can no more be washed bright through the blood of the Son... (Alma 24:12-13, see also vs. 15-16, emphasis mine)

The description of 'bright' and 'stained' is much more applicable to metal swords than to obsidian weapons. Furthermore, why with the constant warfare the Nephites had with the Lamanites would they give up on making metal swords, especially if ore was as abundant as the book repeatedly claims it was?

Nephi supposedly had a steel bow. The earliest use of a steel bow that is known today occurred in India between 500 and 400 B.C. The King James version actually mentions a broken steel bow, but this is a mistranslation - the verse (Psalm 18:34) in the original refers to bending a bronze bow, not breaking a steel one (Coogan 2001). There is simply no reason for the same mistranslation to have occurred in the Book of Mormon. To me it seems more likely that Joseph got the idea for a broken steel bow from the Bible, and that a man named Nephi with a steel bow living during the reign of Zedekiah never existed. Regarding steel in general, according to Yale archeologist Michael Coe, "true metallurgy based on smelting and casting", which is necessary to produce steel, appeared in Mesoamerica no earlier than 800 A.D. (Coe 1973).

There was no wheat, barley or any plow agriculture among ancient American civilizations, yet the Book of Mormon claims these existed (there was eventual limited domestication of indigenous barley in what is now Arizona, but the time and place of this occurrence makes it difficult to associate with Nephite civilization). The Book of Mormon also does not describe the foods that we know ancient Americans did have - chocolate, lima beans, squash, avocado and potatoes, among others. The Book of Mormon claims that the people had sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses and elephants. No such livestock existed in ancient America during the time of the Book of Mormon, or else all genetic and archaeological trace of them has disappeared. The Americas would then be unique in the world as the only place which had a reasonably large civilization raising pigs, goats, horses and cattle but left absolutely no evidence that they had these animals. There is a great deal of artwork from ancient American civilizations depicting many different animals, but none of them depict Old World livestock.

FARMS apologist William Hamblin has dismissed the lack of evidence for horses by noting that no horse bones have been found in areas occupied by the Huns, a people known to make extensive use of horses. Even if that were true, there is ample other evidence to show us that the Huns used horses. Such evidence is completely lacking for ancient Americans. Furthermore, Nephi says they found horses instead of bringing them from the Near East: "And it came to pass that we did find upon the land of promise... the horse..." (1 Nephi 18:25). This makes it difficult to argue that horses would have occupied only a small area around Nephite civilization - these wild horses would have been descendants of Pleistocene horses that scientists believe went extinct around 10,000 BC, or else descended from Jaredite horses, for which there is also no evidence. It is hard to believe that indigenous, wild horses would have left no trace, just like the rest of Nephite civilization.

Even if the animals spoken of by Nephi did exist in the Americas, you don't just grab a few wild animals out of the woods and start using them on the farm. Domestication of animals is a long and difficult process, and requires genetic changes that take place over generations. Out of 148 large terrestrial mammals that are potential candidates for domestication, only 14 have been actually domesticated (Diamond 1997 Tables 9.1 and 9.2; Diamond 2002). Even if there were horses and cattle, it would have been highly unlikely that the original Lehite colonists would have domesticated such native wild animals within Nephi's lifetime.

Before the arrival of Europeans, there was primarily one large domesticated mammal raised as livestock anywhere in the Americas - the llama (dogs were domesticated as well, and limited places in South America that have been ruled out as Book of Mormon locations had guinea pigs). Animals that did exist are not mentioned, such as deer, sloth, monkeys and jaguars. The fact that the Book of Mormon animals don't match the facts on the ground has been acknowledged by Mormon scholars. John Sorenson, who has written extensively in an attempt to match the Book of Mormon with archaeological finds, has suggested that when Mormon writes horses he doesn't really mean horses. In An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Sorenson 1985, p. 299) Sorenson suggests that cattle and oxen could refer to deer or bison. Horses could mean deer or tapir; asses could also mean tapir or llamas. He suggests that elephants could be mammoths, although they were extinct by the time any Book of Mormon people arrived on the continent. Flocks and herds described in the Book of Mormon could have referred to deer, ducks, monkeys and even parrots. This is of course wild speculation - there is no evidence that these creatures were ever domesticated by ancient Americans, and I don't think that Mormon writing 'horse' when he means 'deer' is at all plausible. It shows to what lengths church scholars have to go in order to reconcile the Book of Mormon with the physical evidence (for more details, see Coe 1973; Price 1974; Matheny 1993; Larson 1996; Diamond 1997 offers an overview of animal domestication).

The Book of Mormon describes wheeled chariots, when no wheeled vehicles were made in this hemisphere until long after the Book of Mormon story ends. Some apologists are quick to point out that there were wheeled toys or ritual objects in parts of Mexico, and thus Native Americans knew about the wheel. These artifacts though are not replicas of wheeled vehicles - they are ceramic animals, such as dogs, mounted on wheels. Anthropologists believe the wheeled vehicle was never developed in this hemisphere primarily because there were no large domesticated beasts of burden, such as horses or oxen to pull them. This is probably why plow agriculture did not develop either (Fiedel 1992, p. 182-183).

Stuart Fiedel's Prehistory of the Americas, a college-level textbook, describes the current scientific consensus on wheels, agriculture and livestock in the New World:

Unlike the farming peoples of the Old World, the farmers of Mesoamerica did not domesticate any large herbivores. There were few species native to the region that were potentially domesticable. Horse and camel had become extinct by 7000 BC, and the ranges of bison, antelopes and mountain sheep did not extend south into Mexico. Deer, which were present, appear to have been unsuitable for domestication, since they were not domesticated in the Old World. Perhaps the pig-like Mesoamerican peccary was also too difficult to tame. However the Mexicans did domesticate dogs, turkeys, and ducks...

In the Old World, the larger domesticated animals, such as cattle, water buffalo, and horse, were used to haul plows and wheeled vehicles. In the New World, the simple digging stick was never abandoned, nor were wheeled vehicles used. However, ancient Native Americans were not ignorant of the principle of the wheel. Toy ceramic dogs, mounted on four wheels, have been found in Mexico, near Vercruz. Presumably, in the absence of beasts of burden to pull them, full-sized wheeled vehicles would not have been much more efficient than human porters or litterbearers" (p.181-183).

In another example of an anachronism, the Book of Mormon describes Nephites building synagogues "after the manner of the Jews" (Alma 16:13). Although there is still some debate, most scholars are convinced that synagogues were not built by any Jews until after Lehi left Jerusalem - they were built in response to the Babylonian exile, from which the Lord saved Lehi by warning him to get out. Nephi describes how his people built a replica of Solomon's temple, just not with so many precious materials. Yet the Nephites did not have the people or resources to build such a structure. It took thousands of people seven years to build Solomon's temple, and the Nephites could not have had much more than 100 people at that time.

In fact, population figures in general are strange in the Book of Mormon. By the end of the book there are wars where millions of people are killed - the entire Jaredite civilization is supposedly wiped out, hundreds of thousands of Nephite and Lamanite warriors are killed in an extensive war, and if you figured in women and children the slaughter would be massive. Nephi also claims that wars occurred during his lifetime, and after a few hundred years in the land the Nephites have supposedly spread far and wide at fairly high population densities. When Jacob confronts the skeptical Sherem, it seems as if the two never knew each other personally before. The Nephite population would not have been large enough for this to be realistic. In general, the population growth rates that would be required to achieve the situations described in the book just don't happen (an attempt to analyze population figures in Kunich 1993). Even if we grant that these population sizes were achievable in the time given, this just exacerbates the archeological problem, since Book of Mormon civilizations would have been comparable in population to some of the larger, known, ancient American civilizations for which we have ample evidence. Also, no mention is made in the book of other native populations that existed in ancient America since at least 15,000 BC (of course if you believe Joseph Fielding Smith and reject all modern science, then you can say the earth didn't exist 15,000 years ago). We have ruins of many ancient civilizations that were all over the hemisphere, and yet we are to believe that the Nephites either did not encounter these civilizations or that discovering a large civilization was not important enough to record. To make things worse, in order to explain the improbable population figures some apologists have even gone so far as to claim that Lehi's small band conquered or became rulers of the indigenous population, a crucial act that is entirely unrecorded in the book.