Editor's note: This is adapted from an article previously published in a FARMS journal.
Critics of the Book of Mormon often declare that archaeology demonstrates that no Nephites ever existed, thus proving Joseph Smith and Mormonism fraudulent. Of course, they downplay or altogether ignore significant evidence for the book’s authenticity. But let’s examine their complaint:
Most human artifacts perish. Most archaeological sites haven’t been excavated. We possess only a fraction of even the evidence that still exists. Biblical historian Edwin Yamauchi has justly remarked that "the absence of archaeological evidence is not evidence of absence."
Excavations may or may not have been handled competently; dig results may or may not have been published. And findings are subject to errors of interpretation both by the archaeologists themselves and then by other scholars pursuing their own theories. Opportunities for mistakes are innumerable.
Anthropologist John Sorenson observes that cultural filters can affect even the writing of family histories. How much more so, then, attempts to reconstruct long-vanished societies from mere pottery fragments?
I once heard a story nicely illustrating how even the most conscientious, competent and professional archaeological excavations can miss important data. The archaeologists in this case weren’t searching for something built millennia ago — say, an obscure, long-ruined city in the dense jungles of Guatemala. They weren’t chasing a vanished people whose language and records had disappeared. The story concerns the early 19th-century farm settled in Palmyra, New York, by Joseph Smith Sr. and his family.
The area of the original Smith family cabin — the home in which the young Prophet was living at the time of both the First Vision and the initial visit of Moroni — was excavated in 1982, under the sponsorship of the Historic Sites Committee of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The excavation team was led by Dale Berge of Brigham Young University, a specialist in historic archaeology, and included, among others, Donald Enders and Michael Smith. As modern scientific archaeologists commonly do in order to organize their work and data, the team divided the site into 10-foot squares. Practically speaking, though, each excavated area in the grid system was a 9-foot square, leaving a number of "bulkheads," 2 feet wide, on which workers could walk between the uncovered pits. Such bulkheads are fundamentally important in modern archaeology; without them, a dig would be scientifically flawed. For instance, they help to establish a system of coordinates for identifying the precise location of any find.
The 1982 excavations were productive. Workers were able, for example, to determine roughly where the Smith cabin was located, and they identified a well outside the home that they opened up to a depth of approximately 7 to 11 feet. Unfortunately, for budgetary reasons (a very common constraint in archaeological fieldwork, which is appallingly expensive), the season was short. Few of the bulkheads themselves could be investigated before the team concluded its work. Work didn’t resume in 1983, nor for a considerable time thereafter.
In the summer of 1997, though, the archaeologists returned to the Smith cabin site. Further examination of the well found in 1982 disclosed that it had been dry, and, consequently, useless. Excavation of the remaining bulkheads disclosed the cabin’s drain walls. Designed to permit water and melting snow to flow away from the cabin, these were marked by trenches — roughly 18 inches wide, and 12 to 16 inches deep — filled with stones, on which the logs of the cabin walls rested. These trenches allow us, now, to know quite accurately the dimensions and locations of the cabin's walls. Metal stakes, placed at the end of the summer's work, marked the corners of a building whose foundations measure 18 by 30 feet.
What’s striking about this episode is that the shape and dimensions of the cabin were concealed precisely within the bulkheads of the excavation — an excavation carried out according to standard archaeological methods.
If the Smith cabin and farm had been reconstructed on the basis of the 1982 dig, workers would have restored a useless well that supplied no water. They would, thus, have misled future visitors to the place. And they would have essentially had to guess as to the cabin’s dimensions. These may seem small matters. But they demonstrate clearly that, even when artifacts survive, and even when the site has been professionally examined, important things can easily remain undiscovered. What if there had been no second season of excavating?
Since the overwhelming majority of the world's archaeological remains haven’t been uncovered at all, it’s extremely unlikely that our picture of the ancient world is complete.
Daniel Peterson teaches Arabic studies, founded BYU's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, directs MormonScholarsTestify.org, chairs mormoninterpreter.com, blogs daily at patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson, and speaks only for himself.