Too Good to Be True: Questionable Archaeology and the Book of Mormon

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE: QUESTIONABLE ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE BOOK OF MORMON By Brant Gardner In recent years, two very different books have appeared uncovered the large replica of a shuttle ground that discuss the place of the Book of Mormon in the black slate and highly polished. One surface real world. Although they differ widely in the locations displayed the incised drawing of a man’s head where they place the Book of Mormon action, they are wearing a helmet and the obverse showed two remarkably similar in one sadly coincidental detail. Both lines of writing; a group of cuneiform and a line books use artifacts in support of the Book of Mormon of an unknown script. Over that 19th Century that are known or regarded by experts to be forgeries. summer, more pieces were found in the sur- Even more coincidentally, both authors know of the con- rounding countryside, including a copper dag- troversies, and respond to the debunking of their fa- ger, a clay box, and some slate tablets, each item vored artifacts in similar ways. showing an unknown grouping of script but each on bearing on it the grouping of cuneiform, the The first book is This Land: Zarahemla and the Nephite same as that on the slate shuttle.1 Nation, and the second is The Lives and Travels of Mor- mon and Moroni. The first book places the Book of Mor- A representative slate tablet is shown in Figure 1. In mon lands in North America, with Cumorah in New the circle is the “cuneiform grouping” and in the rect- York and the Mississippi as the Sidon. The second places angle the “unknown script.” Figure 2 shows clay tablets the Book of Mormon in Mesoamerica. While the geog- from the Michigan collection, again highlighting the raphies are diverse, and the archaeological artifacts “cuneiform grouping” in the circles. must necessarily differ, they both include major sections on artifacts that are tantalizingly representative of ex- Even without a physical examination of the artifacts, actly what the Book of Mormon states happens. In the there are features represented that are red flags to any- first case, there is a representation of early Christians one with a background in art history. One of the first in the Americas, and in the second, examples of the very should be the presence of the “cuneiform grouping” on script of the Anthon transcript! Both of the examples a slate tablet. Cuneiform writing was created for use are so remarkable that they would appear to be conclu- with clay tablets. In the soft medium, a stylus was sive proof of the Book of Mormon. They seem almost pressed into groupings that represented the language too good to be true. Unfortunately, they really are too recorded. The shape of the stylus would leave the mark- good to be true. ings seen in these Michigan artifacts. Take a look at the clay tablets, and notice that the formation of the char- acters would be a very simple task. The stylus is simply THIS LAND: ZARAHEMLA AND pressed into the clay, which retains the shape and grouping of the marks. Now note the same markings on THE NEPHITE NATION the slate. In order to gain the shape that is char- The book This Land: Zarahemla and the Nephite acteristic of cuneiform, the maker of the slate Nation is heavily illustrated with artifacts col- text has to draw the shape. The head of the lectively known as the Michigan artifacts. As marking has a triangular shape that must be introduction to these pieces, This Land tells us: drawn rather than punched. When compared with the rest of the “unknown script” the differ- Public awareness of the Michigan Mounds ences are obvious. The rest of the script can be Artifacts began in 1874, in Crystal, Michi- created by an engraving motion. In the “cunei- gan, where a farmer, clearing some land, form grouping,” the text has to be created as The Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research 2 Too Good To Be True though it were a picture, not a letter. Thus we have two different types of script on a single artifact, and scripts that were designed to be created with two different types of tools, and on two different media. The difficulty of reproducing the “cuneiform grouping” on a non-clay surface is illustrated in Figure 3 where the author of the tablet simply gives up and uses a simpler “T” shape rather than the “correct” cuneiform style for the char- acters in the grouping. The omnipresence of this par- ticular grouping led one proponent of the artifacts to label it the “Mystic Symbol,”2 though a critic of the artifacts labeled it the “sign-manual of the forger.”3 For their part, the authors are quite clear that they understand that the artifacts are not only controversial, but have been proclaimed as forgeries from the beginning. From an LDS perspective, no less an LDS scientist that James E. Talmage examined the artifacts and declared them forgeries. Against such evidence, the authors reply: We are quite careful in the way we treat controversial artifacts. The Journal of Book of Mor- mon Studies makes mention from James E. Talmage’s journal the story about the step- daughter of Scotford (the discoverer of some of the Michigan relics), who stated that he had fraudulently manufactured many of the relics. They call this “critical evidence.” The fact is ei- ther the girl is fabricating the story, or she was telling the truth. It can go one way or the other, especially if she had something against him. In Figure 1: Michigan artifact on slate. Figure 2: Clay tablets from the Michigan collection. Copyright © 2002 by FAIR Brant Gardner 3 Figure 3: An “incorrect” representation of the cuneiform our own families, we have seen false accusations ready been done, the year before they published their made, and it is certainly not out of the ques- book. Richard B. Stamps wrote a devastating article in tion.4 BYU Studies.9 Stamps ran several types of close ex- aminations on various types of Michigan artifacts. When In other words, Goble and May state that the declara- examining the clay artifacts he found that the type of tion of a daughter of one of the forgers is insufficient clay and temper was not representative of that found proof, as is any of the reasoning by any of the experts. in Michigan. In addition, several of the clay pieces have At one point, the authors decry Talmage for going with the “IH/” symbol on one side, and marks of saw-cut wood the intent to repudiate the artifacts because such a pre- on the other. As Stamps notes: conception would flavor his response.5 Nevertheless, they approve of a proponent who was “believing from Because modern tools leave modern marks, it the outset that the Michigan artifacts were genuine.”6 is logical, with these additional examples, to agree with Kelsey and Spooner that the clay The impassioned plea of the authors is simply: artifacts having the “IH/” symbol on one side and historic period woodprints on the other date We have shown things that are controversial to the historic period.10 and have not been redeemed by science yet. We recognize that these cannot be regarded as “evi- Further evidence of the impossibility of the clay objects’ dence” yet. antiquity is that they dissolve in water, and thus could not survive in Michigan ground, In spite of that, these artifacts still demand further research and cannot be dismissed out of with its rainy springs, humid summers, and cold, hand, as they have a high probability of being snowy winters. The winter frost action, com- real. Just test them is all we ask.7 bined with the day thaw-night freeze sequence in early spring destroys low-fired prehistoric Somehow in their rather self-serving dismissal of ceramics from the Woodland period. Water pen- Talmage’s probe, they missed the fact that Talmage had etrates the porous pottery and, when the tem- sent samples of one of the artifacts that he participated perature drops low enough, it freezes, forming in retrieving for scientific analysis, and the results were crystals that split the pottery. Many of the that it was factory-smelted copper, hardly the type of unfired Michigan Relic clay pieces have survived material that could have been used by an ancient pre- for more than one hundred years only because industrial population.8 they have been stored in museums or collectors’ cabinets, protected from the harsh Michigan Unfortunately for the publication of the text, the au- weather. If placed in the ground, they would not thors were apparently also unaware that exactly this survive ten let alone hundreds of years.11 type of scientific testing for which they plead has al- www.fair-lds.org 4 Too Good To Be True Stamps also examined some of the copper pieces, yield- Byzantine domes, pyramids, buildings, doors ing the same microscopical conclusion as the report to with windows on the sides, and double-hung, Dr. Talmage. The pieces are modern smelted copper.12 framed windows suggest Masonic Hall archi- In addition: tecture. The use of perspective in drawings is a concept that did not appear in Europe until the In cross-section, I observed that the tempera- fifteenth century—much too late to have come ture difference on the surface differes slightly to Michigan with the lost ten tribes or even the from the temperature at the center. This differ- fifth-century Coptic Christians—two of the theo- ence is another evidence that the piece was ries concerning the artifacts’ origins.18 made from smelted ingots that had been hot- rolled.

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