Mormonism

The most long lasting effect of these ideas about the Israelite origins of the Native Americans was the establishment of a completely new religion, which its founder, Joseph Smith (1805-1844), claimed to have been directly revealed to him in 1827. According to the Book of Mormon, the holy text of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (more popularly known as the Mormons), a people known as the Jaredites arrived in America around 2247 BCE. The Jaredites were a group of people from the Middle East who had fled their homeland, following the destruction of the Tower of Babel and built a thriving civilisation. Their civilisation was subsequently destroyed in a great battle at Hill Cumorah; there is much debate within the church about the location of this hill, which places it anywhere between the Gulf of Mexico and New York. The Jaredites were followed around 600 BCE, before the fall of Jerusalem, by further groups of Israelites, the Lamanites and Nephites, who were the builders of the earthen mounds of the eastern USA. When war broke out between the Lamanites and the Nephites, the Lamanites eventually won and wiped out the Nephites c 421 CE. The Lamanites were cursed by god for their sinful behaviour and accordingly he turned them red-skinned.

As an apparently historical narrative, the story told by the Book of Mormon ought to be testable, just like the bible, but despite many years of effort by Mormon archaeologists, no archaeological evidence has ever been found to support any of this story. Indeed, it looks like an obvious justification for European supremacy: the Lamanites (who are the Native Americans) are not only not the original inhabitants of the Americas, as the much superior Jaredites were there first, but they have also committed a sin so terrible that they now bear its mark for all time. This is exactly the same argument that was once used by Christian apologists for the apartheid régime in South Africa, who argued that the Africans, as descendants of Ham, had been cursed by Jehovah and bore the mark of the curse as their black skin. The arrival of the Jaredites corresponds neither to the arrival of the first humans in North America (the precise date is hotly disputed, but they were there by 13,000 BCE at the latest) nor to the first flourishings of any American civilisation. This causes problems for Mormon archaeologists, who are able to detect numerous civilisations in North America, none of which appears to be of the right date or to possess any of the characteristics attributed to them in the ‘divinely inspired’ Book of Mormon.

The Book of Mormon and archaeology

The narrative parts of the Book of Mormon are devoted to the migrations of people from ancient Judaea to America. Three migrations are supposed to have occurred: the first c 2247 BCE, involving the Jaredites, who were wiped out c 600 BCE at the Battle at Hill Cumorah; the second and third migrations, of the Nephites and the Lamanites, happened after 600 BCE, between the times of the Assyrian and Babylonian victories over Israel and Judah. The Nephites kept the Law of Moses, but the Lamanites abandoned their ancestral beliefs, as a result of which, the “Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them” (2 Nephi 5.21). Once again, the Nephites were wiped out c 421 CE at a second Battle at Hill Cumorah.

If the claims of the Book of Mormon to be a true record of American history are correct, we would hope to find archaeological evidence for the achievements of these trans-Atlantic Israelites. According to the Book of Mormon, the people spread from north to south and from sea to sea (Mormon 1.17), building fortified cities (Helaman 3.8-9). They had metallurgy (Jarom 1.8, 2 Nephi 5.15, Alma 43.18-19), wheat and barley (Mosiah 9.9), coinage (Helaman 3.7-12, Alma 11.5-20), domesticated elephants, horses, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs (Ether 9.17-19), an organised religion based around temples and synagogues (Jerom 1.8, Helaman 3.9), silk and linen (Alma 4.6, Ether 10.24), a written language known as Reformed Egyptian (Helaman 3.15, Mormon 9.32) and a military technology that included archery and chariots (3 Nephi 3:22).

Some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have pointed to certain Native American seasonal festivals and other gatherings as evidence for the accuracy of the Book of Mormon. The ancient city of Kaminaljuyu (the modern Guatemala City) has been identified with Nephi, mentioned in the Book of Mormon, while a hill in New York state (USA) is identified with Hill Cumorah (although there are some non-orthodox Mormons who claim it to be El Cerro Vigia, a hill in southern Mexico, or one of a number of other sites).

The modern science of genetics has allowed archaeologists to examine the ancestries of present-day Native Americans. If they were descended from the Lamanites of the Book of Mormon, then we would expect to find close correspondences between their DNA and that of modern Jewish and Palestinian people. In fact, there is no correspondence whatsoever beyond those traits that link all humans. The DNA of all Native Americans is very similar to that of present-day Siberians, although there is also controversial evidence that some early peoples – those associated with a tool type known as Clovis points – may have migrated from Europe along the southern margins of the polar ice cap.

Things get worse for the Mormon Bad Archaeologists. No bones or seeds from any of the domestic species described by the Book of Mormon have ever been identified in the excavations of pre-Columbian sites; similarly, although meteoric iron and native copper were hammered into shapes by some Native American peoples, there is no evidence for true metallurgy before the arrival of Europeans; no recognisable Jewish temples (which ought to resemble their Old World precursors) have ever been identified, while the synagogues named in the Book of Mormon did not exist anywhere at the time of any of the supposed migrations. The technology of archery has not been recognised on American sites older than 1000 CE, almost six hundred years after the second Battle at Hill Cumorah, although it is always possible that evidence for archery at an earlier date will one day be found. The only writing systems to have been recognised in the Americas are those used by the Maya and the Aztecs, neither of which resembles Egyptian hieroglyphs, although Joseph Smith, the founder of the religion, produced a scrap of papyrus containing hieroglyphs he claimed to be a Reformed Egyptian text written by the Patriarch Abraham. Another problem that has never been explained is why Jewish people would write in Egyptian, the language of their hated oppressors, that they had never used in their native land.

Some have made claims that the physical evidence has been found. They include such things as the Bat Creek Stone, the Kinderhook Plates, the Newark Stones and the Phoenician Ten Commandments (otherwise known as the Los Lunas inscription). Not one of these has proved to be anything other than a nineteenth- or twentieth-century forgery. The fortified cities, the coins, the silken garments, the chariots and so on continue to prove frustratingly elusive for orthodox Mormon archaeology.

This page was last updated on 28 July 2007
Written by: Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews and James Doeser