In this very thread, other Mormons stated that we have no way of knowing where in North or South America the BoM peoples settled. You however have committed yourself, which makes it easier to refute.
I committed myself to what??? We were discussing Lindsay's website and I've made no claims about BoM locations. To be honest, I am not a literalist and do not base my faith on whether the BoM includes events that actually happened or not. I view it as mythology - a collection of stories meant to teach a particular culture Truth.
Well, just as the theory of evolution, except that ToE is well evidence, and the theory that near eastern immigrants settled Meso-America has no substantial credible evidence to support it.
Doesn't the Lindsay website describe the temples found in Meso-America and make comparisons to the Temple of Soloman??? Did I miss something???
That's not the question. There are some temples in some places in America that bear some resemblance to some temples in the ancient near east? Yes. Are there temples in MesoAmerica built by the immigrants described in the BoM? Clearly not.
Doesn't the Lindsay website describe the temples found in Meso-America and make comparisons to the Temple of Soloman??? Did I miss something???
I didn't lump, I listed several things separately. For the BoM people to have built these temples, we would expect to find evidence of all of these things. We find evidence of none of them. The evidence shows that what is described in the BoM did not happen in MesoAmerica, which is where you said it happened. Therefore, IT DIDN'T HAPPEN.
You lumped. Listing several things separately in one post one after the other is lumping, my dear.
AND I DIDN'T SAY IT HAPPENED IN MESO-AMERICA!!! That is from the Lindsay website, which we were discussing. Do not transfer claims.
Take them in order. No smelting. No metals. No wheat. No cities. No chariots. No swords. No cities. No herding culture. No cattle. No horses. No elephants. No archeological evidence that matches what the BoM says. Which is why no professional archeologist, including Mormon archeologists, assert that there is archeological evidence to support the BoM. And yet you persist in believing it. Why?
You're lumping again.
Why don't we talk more about the supposed gardens, towers, and markets of the area. From the website:
Helaman 7:10 in the Book of Mormon speaks of the prophet and religious leader Nephi, a descendant of the original Nephi who crossed the ocean, praying out loud on a tower in his garden "which was by the highway which led to the chief market, which was in the city of Zarahemla." In 1830 and even in much of this century, the idea of ancient Americans having urban gardens, multiple markets (implied by the existence of a "a chief market"), highways, and personal towers seemed out of place. Recent discoveries now show that Helaman 7:10 is entirely plausible. Chapter 68 of
Reexploring the Book of Mormon, (ed. John Welch, Deseret Book Comp., Salt Lake City, UT, 1992, pp. 236-237) explains:
[FONT=Geneva,Verdana,Arial,Helvetica][SIZE=-1]The "tower" might easily refer to pyramidal mounds, some built and used by families and lineage leaders for religious ceremonies, and which were referred to by the Spanish conquerors as "towers." Highways too are now well known in Mesoamerica during Book of Mormon times. But what evidence is there of gardens and chief markets in ancient Mesoamerican cities?
Gardens. For decades the prevailing view was that cities with high-density populations did not exist at all in Mesoamerica. In the last twenty years, however, intensive work at places like Teotihuacan and Monte Alban have demonstrated unquestionably that cities in the modern sense were indeed known during the Book of Mormon times.
Indeed, in at least some of those cities, garden areas were cultivated immediately adjacent to single habitation complexes. At the archaeological site of El Tajin near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico east of Mexico City are the remains of a city that occupied at least five square kilometers at its maximum period, probably between A.D. 600-900. At that time, the houses of its middle-class people were surrounded by gardens and fruit trees. Likewise, the famous city of Tula, north of the capital of Mexico, was even larger, up to fourteen square kilometers around A.D. 1000-1100, and gardened houselots were common there too.
Chief Markets. No one knowledgeable of pre-Columbian Mexico has had any doubt that markets were found in all sizeable settlements. Cortez and his fellows were amazed by the market in Tlatelolco in the Valley of Mexico, by its diversity of goods, and by the complexity of its organization. Yet until recently, only little attention has been given to the fact that a number of these cities had multiple markets.
The evidence, however, seems quite clear. Blanton and Kowalewski, for example, have noted that Monte Alban had both a chief market and subsidiary ones. For Teotihuacan, Rene Millon identifies one location as "the principal marketplace" and suggests that other markets existed for special products, such as kitchen wares. George Cowgill, the other leading expert on Teotihuacan, concurs. The Krotsers point out the same phenomenon at El Tajin. Meanwhile Edward Calnek's reexamination of documentary evidence on the organization of the Aztec capital, Tenochititlan, has established that each major sector of the city had its own market, in addition to the giant central one. Apparently Zarahemla was no different. These things once seemed problematic in the book of Helaman's casual description of Nephi's neighborhood. They turn out instead to have substance beyond what was known only a few years ago.
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Regarding gardens, Michael D. Coe in The Maya (4th edition, London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, p. 156) states:
[FONT=Geneva,Verdana,Arial,Helvetica][SIZE=-1]Every Maya household had its own kitchen garden in which vegetables and fruit trees were raised, and fruit groves were scattered near settlements as well. Papaya, avocado, custard apple, sapodilla, and the breadnut tree were all cultivated. . . . [/SIZE][/FONT]
The idea of Nephi having his own garden in an urban setting now makes a lot of sense.
Regarding the chief market concept, one scholarly publication notes that "the high development of the market as an institution and the rise of specialized merchants is distinctively Mesoamerican," and "markets were emphasized in native Mesoamerica as they are today" (Gordon R. Willey, Gordon F. Elkholm, and René F. Millon, "The Patterns of Farming Life and Civilization," in
Handbook of Middle American Indians (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 1:461-62, as cited in
Pressing Forward with the Book of Mormon, edited by John W. Welch and Melvin J. Thorne, Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1999, p. 197). Another said, "Around the major market are a series of market places" which "specialize in a given produce or commodity and . . . carry a reduced selection of the goods available in the central market" (Manning Nash, "Indian Economies," in
Handbook of Middle American Indians, 6:87, in
Pressing Forward with the Book of Mormon, p. 198). Others observed that "the most important economic institution of the ancient Maya was the centralized market" (S.G. Morley and G.W. Brainerd,
The Ancient Maya, 4th ed. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1983), p. 249, as cited in
Pressing Forward with the Book of Mormon, p. 198). The Native Americans that Joseph would have known of could not have provided him with knowledge of central markets that were once on this continent. Could Joseph Smith have guessed in 1829 that ancient inhabitants of this continent once had central markets and many other complex social and economic features of advanced civilizations? Could he have known of ancient Mesoamerican features like urban gardens, highways, towers, temples, fortified cities, record keeping, and so forth? Knowledge of Mesoamerican civilization in Joseph's day was minuscule (see, for example, "
What Could Joseph Smith Have Known about Mesoamerica?"). If he had made up the Book of Mormon based on what he knew or guessed, there would be nothing left to defend after a couple of decades from publication. Instead, the Book of Mormon initially seemed hopelessly ridiculous, talking about ancient natives in advanced civilizations, so unlike those that were known in Joseph Smith's setting, but advances in knowledge increasingly lend plausibility to the Book of Mormon in an ancient Mesoamerican setting in ways that rule out Joseph Smith as the author.
(just kidding)
