History: Verses 1–7 constitute Mormon’s insertion, providing an overview of the Amulonites’ influence on the Lamanites. However, this passage poses some problems about their probable historic accuracy:
• Mormon is writing nearly five hundred years after these events.
• It is doubtful that his descriptions of Lamanite policies and tendencies relied on Lamanite records.
• Mormon ascribes most of the eventual Lamanite culture to Nephite culture imported through the Amulonites. This vector of transmission contradicts both the Book of Mormon’s internal evidence and the archaeological record.
A more likely explanation is that Mormon is indulging himself in assumptions of his own cultural superiority by attributing to it all of the Lamanite advances that result from this point. This same ethnocentric tendency overshadowed much of the earliest modern research into the history of the New World, since most of the native advances were assumed to be related to the importation of ideas and peoples from the Old World. According to historian Nigel Davis, “Most earlier writers on American origins erred on the side of boldness, claiming that Indian culture derived form such a medley of peoples as Israelites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Koreans, Trojans, Etruscans, Scythians, Greeks, Tartars, Chinese, Irish, Welsh, and Norsemen, to name only a few. Passing references were made to Cretans, less known at the time but perhaps a more obvious choice, in view of the maritime skills.”
Mormon writers have been equally assertive in proclaiming the Israelite origins of the American Indian, with equal error in overstepping the Book of Mormon’s own claims. Rather than being an explanation of all Amerindian peoples, the Book of Mormon deals with a smaller number of people in a limited geographic area. (See “Excursus: Geography and the Book of Mormon,” following 1 Nephi 18.)
However, the question remains open whether there were contacts between the Old World and the New: “The arguments have, in fact, developed into a hundred years’ war, with no end in sight,” comments Davies. “At the 35th International Congress of Americanists, held in Mexico City in 1962, the experts were once more locked in combat over precisely the same problem, and again tempers became frayed. Since then discussion has continued unabated.… Nowadays many anthropologists prefer to keep an open mind about pre-Columbian contacts between the two hemispheres.” The result of this more open-minded approach has been the discovery of several indications of ancient contact between the Old and the New Worlds.
For Mormons, the presence of some Israelites in the New World is a matter of faith. While the Book of Mormon is quite consistent in describing those Israelites as they participated in a Mesoamerican culture, it says nothing at all about the direction of influence of culture, whether the Israelites provided culture to the Mesoamericans or the Mesoamericans provided it to the Israelites.
Archaeology, on the other hand, is reasonably clear that the greatest transfer of culture was from the Mesoamericans to the Israelites, in that the Mesoamerican culture can be traced to times prior to Book of Mormon contact and there are no obvious Israelite cultural influences in the Mesoamerican culture set. Of course, this finding does not prove that the Israelites were not there, as some archaeologists would propose. It merely states that the material culture of the Book of Mormon participated in that of Mesoamerica, just as modern Mormons in every country participate in the material culture of their own lands, with homes, vehicles, and cooking utensils identical to those of their non-Mormon neighbors. As John E. Clark, LDS archaeologist at Brigham Young University and head of the New World Archaeological Foundation, recently noted: “Book of Mormon cities have been found, they are well known, and their artifacts grace the finest museums. They are merely masked by archaeological labels such as ‘Maya,’ ‘Olmec,’ and so on. The problem, then, is not that Book of Mormon artifacts have not been found, only that they have not been recognized for what they are. Again, if we stumbled onto Zarahemla, how would we know? The difficulty is not with evidence but with epistemology.”
This tendency to see one’s own culture as dominant (and therefore as the source for other cultures) is a very old one. As I read this passage, it was manifesting itself in Mormon’s prose when he asserts that most Lamanite advances were due to the Amulonites teaching Nephite ways to the Lamanites. While they may have done so in some cases, the picture Mormon gives of the renaissance of Lamanite culture after contact with a few men overstates the case that can be reconstructed from the Book of Mormon text and the area’s archaeology.
Perhaps readers may ask on what basis one questions the accuracy of anything in the Book of Mormon, since Joseph Smith called it the “most correct book.” Obviously, “correctness” has much more to do with doctrinal purity than with the absence of error, as the numerous spelling and grammar corrections attest.
Since the “correctness” or the Book of Mormon does not preclude its essential existence as the result of human labor, with the potential imperfections of human nature, we may turn to the Bible as a model for how humans have dealt with information about and from the divine. That text also shows its rootedness in particular places and times and in the culture-bound notions of its writers, inspired though they were. Similarly, we may expect that the Book of Mormon is the result of humans who participate in and express much of their own cultures. In the ancient world, there is a nearly universal tendency to exalt one’s own people over any and all others. These touches of ancient values in the Book of Mormon only strengthen our understanding that the book was written by real people, in a real place, during real times.