Archaeology Professor Discounts Book of Mormon
Validity
Yale Archaeology Prof. Michael D. Coe finds evidence that Book of Mormon is a fake document.
The following are excerpts from "This Is Not the Place," by Hampton Sides, published in Doubletake magazine, Vol.5 No.2, Spring 1999. Doubletake is published by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, 1317 W. Pettigrew St., Durham, NC 27705
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Perhaps the most outspoken critic of Mormon archaeology has been Yale University's Michael D. Coe, one of the world's preeminent scholars of the Olmec and the Maya. The author of the best-selling book, Breaking the Mayan Code, Coe says that there's not "a whit of evidence that the Nephites ever existed. The enterprize is complete rot, root and branch, It's so racist it hurts. It fits right into the nineteenth-century American idea that only a white man could have built cities and temples, that American Indians didn't have the brains or the wherewithal to create their own civilization."
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In his youth, [Joseph] Smith had poked around the backwoods as a "money digger," hunting for buried treasure that he said had been left by ancient civilizations. Throughout his life, he was fascinated by Indian mounds and like to spin intricate romances about who built them, and why. "Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined," the prophet's mother, Lucy Smith, once recalled. "He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of traveling, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular, their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life with them."
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At one point, he [Joseph Smith] enthusiastically stated that the Palenque ruins [reported to the US in 1841] were "among the mighty works of the Nephites."
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A former chairman of BYU's anthropology department, [John] Sorenson is a full-time scholar at FARMS [Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies] and the author of numerous books, including the definitive work on the subject, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. Personally involved in nearly every debate of consequence in the field in the past half-century, Sorenson is one of the principle architects of the notion that the Book of Mormon occurred in Mesoamerica.
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"You know," he [Sorenson] began, "I've never asked the question, 'Did the events in the book of Mormon happen?' I was born and raised in the church, and so for me this is beyond doubt. The question I've asked for over fifty years of scholarship is, 'How did they happen?' Where did these people live, what were they like, what did they eat? I am very interested in establishing the Book's historicity. This is supposed to be an authentic record of dead people. It won't suffice to say the Joseph Smith merely wrote it to impart a few spiritual truths. If it were ever conclusively demonstrated that Smith simply made it up, I don't know whether the church could survive."
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The Book of Mormon describes dozens of other species of animals and domesticated plants that have yet to turn up in any pre-Colombian Mesoamerican excavations, including horses, asses, bulls, goats, oxen, sheep, barely, grapes, olives, figs, and wheat. This is not to mention all the inanimate objects: coins, functional wheeels, metal swords, brass armor, chariots, carriages, glass, chains, golden plates.
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Other Mormon scholars have been less willing to trowel over these apparent inconsistencies. In at least one public forum, BYU archaeologist Ray Matheny has been surpisingly blunt about the serious dilemmas posed by these rather glaring holes in the archaeological record. "I'd say this is a fairly king-sized problem," Matheny observed at a tape-recorded symposium in 1984 in Salt Lake City. "Mormons, in particular, have been grasping at straws for a very long time, trying to thread together all of these little esoteric finds that are out of context. If I were doing it cold, I would say in evaluating the Book of Mormon that it had no place in the New World whatsoever. It just doesn't seem to fit anything I have ever been taught in my discipline in anthropology. It seems these are anachronisms." Matheny concluded his talk with a sockdolager: "As an archaeologist," he said, "what [can] I say...that might be positive for the Book of Mormon? Well, really very little." Several Mormon archaeologists told me that Matheny's remarks cause a considerable stir within church circles and came close to costing him his tenure at BYU. Matheny has since carefully refrained from further public commentary on this subject, and he declined to be interviewed for this story.
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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 (like tapirs [for horses] and nuptial beds [for chariots]) while avoiding what is most obvious: that Joseph Smith probably meant the word "horse," when he wrote the word "horse," and all the archaeology in the world is not likely to change the fact that horses as we know them weren't around until the Spaniards arrived on American shores. "They're always going after the nitty-gritty things," Coe told me. "Let's look at this specific hill. Let's look at that specific tree. It's exhausting to follow all these mind-numbing leads. It keeps the focus off the fact that it's all in the service of a completely phony history. Where are the languages? Where are the cities? Where are the artifacts? Look, here, they'll say. Here's an elephant. Well, that's fine, but elephants were wiped out in the New World around 8,000 B.C. by hunters. There were no elephants!"
Another eminent Mormon archaeologist of Mesosamerica, Gareth Lowe, has come down hard on Sorenson's attempts to, as he puts it, "explain the unexplainable." "A lot of Mormon 'science' is just talking the loudest and the longest," says Lowe. "That's what Sorenson is all about, out-talking everyone else. He's an intelligent man, but he's applied his intelligence toward questionable ends."
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After much searching, Sorenson has postulated that a certain mountain along the coastal plains of Vercruz called Cerro El Vigia is the "most likely candidate" for the Hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon. (As fantastic as it may seem, Sorenson actually argues that there are two Cumorahs: one in Mexico where the great battle took place, and where Moroni buried a longer, unexpurgated version of the golden Nephite records; and one near Palmyra, New York, where Moroni eventually buried a condensed version of the plates after lugging them on an epic northeastward trek of several thousand miles.)
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I asked Lowe whether, after all those years digging under auspices of the church, he was still a faithful Mormon. He paused thoughtfully for a long moment and then replied, somewhat gingerly, "Well, my wife still is." Yale's Michael Coe worked with Gareth Lowe and other NWAF [New World Archaeology Foundation--BYU funded] in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and he says he has "nothing but absolute admiration" for their work. "They did the first really long-term, large-scale work on the preclassic in Mesoamerica, and they published it all. And by and large, their Mormonism never came through. Occasionally, they'd get these dopes out of Utah who'd arrive with metal detectors and earphones and march around their sites trying to find the plates of gold. But the foundation's scholars always made sure they got on the plane and went back home. What's amazing is that they were able to do this kind of scholarship within the context of what is essentially a totalitarian organization. There isn't much difference betweeen the old Red Square and Temple Square. But as in the Soviet Union, even given the terrible theoretical framework that they had to operate under, the foundation managed to do excellent work in spite of it."
Page Modified January 7, 2000