The archaeology of Middle America

New world archaeology is distinguished by the absence of many features usually associated with civilized life. The following are some of the more striking examples.

1. Contrary to what the Book of Mormon states, and to what Mormons claim archaeology reveals, the natives of the New World hardly ever lived in cities. True cities ‘were rare anywhere in the aboriginal New World, especially in Mexico’. The word is sometimes used indiscriminately to describe the ceremonial centre which was the focus of religious and social life in Middle America but which Bushnell considers was more akin to a cathedral close. Some of the ceremonial centres of the immediate pre-colonial period had urban populations, but they were by no means usual. In any case they do not concern us, as they fall well outside the period spanned by the book of Mormon.

There is only one exception during the centuries accounted for in the Book of Mormon: the ceremonial centre of Teotihuacán, which flourished in the Valley of Mexico from about 100 BC to 600 AD, can rightly be described as a city, in that it was surrounded by the dwellings of the people. Elsewhere the people lived in scattered villages, travelling to the ceremonial centres to attend the temple ritual or to shop at the markets, which were a regular feature of Middle American life. Of the many cities which proliferate among the pages of the Book of Mormon, and of those whose destruction is so graphically recorded therein, no trace has yet come to light.

2. New World archaeology reveals a complete absence of metals. When the Spaniards arrived in the New World they came upon civilisations that had only just emerged from the Stone Age. The Incas of Peru possessed a few bronze tools made form metal obtained in streams, and a few copper tools were in use in parts of Mexico, but metallurgy as a craft was of a relatively recent date. The great buildings of Middle America and Peru were constructed entirely with stone tools. Metals were unknown in Mexico before 900 AD. Josephy maintains that the art of metallurgy was introduced into Middle America from the south in Toltec times, that is about the tenth century AD.

What, then, are we to make of the iron age civilisations described in such detail in the Book of Mormon? So far as it indicated by the present state of archaeological knowledge, there is not the slightest evidence that any civilisations so described ever existed. No iron, steel or brass, no chariots, swords, shields, breastplates or any form of armour have ever been recovered from pre-Columbian archaeological sites. The metal objects frequently mentioned by Mormons—the gold ornaments and copper chisels dredged from the sacred Maya well at Chichen Itza, for example—post-date the close of Book of Mormon history by many centuries.

3. The Indians could not have had any use for many roads and highways mentioned in the Book of Mormon, for they had no wheeled vehicles, though the discovery of wheeled toys is proof at least the principle was known. Transporting was limited to the canoe and, n the case of land transport, to litters borne by men. The reason why the wheel was never put to practical use is to be found in the absence of domesticated animals suitable for draught purposes. The ox, the horse and the ass which the Nephites, and the Jaredites before them, are said to have possessed were introduced into America by Europeans, as were the cattle, sheep and swine which the Jaredites are supposed to have domesticated. The only domestic animal known to both hemispheres was the dog. Elephants, said to have inhabited the land in the days of the Jaredites, have departed without trace: no one skeleton has been found in any archaeological site.

Mormons make much of the fact that the bones of horses have been found in archaeological sites together with human artefacts and are correct when they argue that this indicates the contemporaneous existence of the horse and the early American. However, in Mormon thinking, the early American was no earlier than 2,200 BC. The native, pre-historic horse was hunted to extinction during the Ice Age.

4. No civilisation can develop without some effective means of food production. The emergence of high civilisations in pre-Columbian America was made possible by the cultivation of maize, beans, squash. Early remains of these crops have been found in dry caves throughout the Americas. These are quite different crops from those of the Old World. The ‘wheat and barley’ and ‘all manner of grain’ mentioned in the Book of Mormon were nowhere present in the New World scheme of food production. The absence of all the Old World fruit trees is also curious, considering that the Jaredites are said to have brought with them ‘seeds of every kind’, and the Nephites are also supposed to have had the foresight to take seeds with them when they departed from Jerusalem. The absence of the plough has already been noted. Indian framers employed the slash and burn method to clear the ground, and tilled the soil by means of the digging stick. New World agriculture, in short, had none of the crops and none of the cultivation techniques of the Old World.

The pre-Columbian civilisations, then, uniquely lacking many of those features common to civilized life in the Old World, which features are given prominence in the pages of the Book of Mormon, have proved an unsuspected trap for the author of that work.