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Adri-at-BYU (talk·contribs) has been paid by BYU. Their editing has included contributions to this article.
"Archaeological studies in the New World that tie Book of Mormon places and peoples to real world locations and civilizations are incredibly difficult since there are generally no landmarks defined in the Book of Mormon that can unambiguously identify real world locations."
It would seem to me that this is inaccurate - or at least highly debatable - as the Hill Cumorah seems to be as close to a landmark that can "unambiguously identify real world locations" as one could want. I understand the "two Cumorahs" hypothesis is popular among some, but I don't think that the article should state this so categorically. Not to mention that this is arguably a non-sequitur: standard archeological research doesn't start with *any* landmarks to help them out so why should this make the process "incredibly difficult." Lastly, of course, I'd love to see a citation.
You are looking in the wrong place. Look in North America. You won't find much evidence though because Most of it was destroyed by the government to show that the Native Americans are savage, or were destroyed by accident by farmers when creating farmland. 38.141.37.227 (talk) 21:03, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Joseph Smith himself identified several locations across North America as specific locations in the Book of Mormon. For example, when he found a skull in the midwest, Smith purported to identify the individual as a Lamanite who was killed in the final wars that exterminated the Nephites. Less definitively, Smith commanded that the banks of the river across from Nauvoo should be called "Zarahemla". Finally, Smith himself was very clear that the Palmyra hill was the location of the last battle of the Nephites. The two Cumorahs theory is a post-hoc explanation after it because definitive that no ancient battlefield or even stone box was ever present on and around the hill. There had previously been a story recounted by Brigham Young and otheres about Smith finding an even larger trove of plates in a cave that magically opened to him [1]. However, this story has been downplayed and discredited by the church and its adherents for many decades now after it became clear that the hill is a drumlin (a gravel pile deposited by a glacier) and a cave is physically impossible.
Smith was also extremely clear on several occasions, not to mention the Book of Mormon itself, that the entire western hemisphere is where the events of the Book of Mormon took place. All the apologia since has had to discredit his declarations because the archeology so decidedly discredits Smith.
There is already a whole page for Anachronisms in the Book of Mormon and it seems redundant to have so much on this page. Before I do anything, does anyone have thoughts on moving any information not already there to the Anachronisms page? I could leave a condensed summary on this Archaeology page linking to Anachronisms. Feel free to leave feedback or alternate suggestions! I'm not thinking to move everything, probably things like the animals. Adri-at-BYU (talk) 19:47, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We should definitely remove the apologetics from that part of the article. But removing this section would detract from the article. If we aren't talking about what hasn't been found, what are we talking about? Big Money Threepwood (talk) 08:22, 6 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes it would detract from this article in the sense of reducing it considerably, but I don't see a problem with that. Wikipedia as a whole is the project we're trying to improve, we don't need to pad one page with a slightly condensed version of another page just to make the first page look good. I agree the section is redundant, and it requires duplicated effort to keep both pages current and consistent.
Talking of duplicated effort, this suggestion has been made before - I was involved in a discussion in 2018, and an archive search tells me that wasn't the first. Small improvements have been made but there has never (yet?) been enough consensus to fix the underlying problem, which is the large overlap in scope between the two pages.
We could do with reaching some kind of consensus here. Do we carry on as it is? Merge the two pages under one heading? Delete the duplicated parts from this page or the other? How about, replace the Anachronisms section here with a one-paragraph summary, and move it up the page so it's more obvious that this is not the only archaeology-related Book of Mormon page? Pastychomper (talk) 15:45, 6 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
