By Jerald and Sandra Tanner
In an article published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Summer 1969, Dee Green, who had been deeply involved in archaeological work at the Church’s Brigham Young University declared:
The first myth we need to eliminate is that Book of Mormon archaeology exists. . . . no Book of Mormon location is known with reference to modern typography. Biblical archaeology can be studied because we do know where Jerusalem and Jericho were and are, but we do not know where Zarahemla and Bountiful (nor any location for that matter) were or are.
Although some people have been misled into believing the situation has changed sine Dee Green made his comments, it is clear that Mormon archaeologists are still in the same predicament. This was pointed out at the Sunstone Symposium held on August 25, 1984. After a non-Mormon scholar made some critical comments concerning the relationship of the Book of Mormon to archaeology, two Mormon anthropologists responded to the challenge. Their comments were anything but encouraging to believers in the Book of Mormon. Ray T. Matheny, Professor of Anthropology at BYU, admitted that what had been found so far is disappointing:
No evidence has been found in the New World for a ferrous metallurgical industry dating to pre-Columbian times. And so this is a king-size kind of problem, it seems to me, for so-called Book of Mormon archaeology. . . . I really have difficulty in finding issue or quarrel with those opening chapters of the Book of Mormon. But thereafter it doesn’t seem like a translation to me. It seems more like a transliteration. And the terminologies and the language used and the methods of explaining and putting things down are 19th century literary concepts and cultural experiences on would expect Joseph Smith and his colleagues would experience. And for that reason I call it a transliteration, and I’d rather not call it a translation after that 7th chapter. And I have real difficulty in trying to relate these cultural concepts as I’ve briefly discussed here with archaeological findings that I’m aware of. . . .
If I were doing this cold like John Carlson is here, I would say in evaluating the Book of Mormon that it had no place in the New World whatsoever. I would have to look for the place of the Book of Mormon events to have taken place in the Old World. It just doesn’t fit anything that he has been taught in his discipline, nor I in mu discipline in anthropology, history; there seems to be no place for it. It seems misplaced. . . . I think there’s a great difficulty here for we Mormons in understand what this book is all about. (“Book of Mormon Archaeology,” Response by Professor Ray T. Matheny, typed copy transcribed from a tape-recording, pages 21, 30 and 31)
Bruce Warren, who is also a Professor of Anthropology at BYU, said that he hoped that the situation would change in the next 25 years, but he admitted that “today there really is not Book of Mormon archaeology” (Ibid., page 42).
For those who are interested in learning more about the Book of Mormon and archaeology we recommend our book Mormonism—Shadow or Reality?
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