I recently learned of L’Anse aux Meadows. It’s a place in Newfoundland, Canada where Vikings settled about 1,000 years ago. It’s the oldest European settlement in the Americas. The Vikings didn’t live there very long — only about 10 years — and it seems that there weren’t that many of them. It’s only a small site — no stables, no burials.
Yet for that small a group in so short a time, they left enough artifacts to fill a small museum.
Long-time readers will see where I’m going with this. The Book of Mormon claims to be the history of a group of people who lived in the Americas for about a thousand years, numbering in the millions. The book discusses their metalwork, their swords, their coins, their money, and much more — no evidence of which occurs in the archaeological record. And they didn’t dwindle down slowly — they were supposedly killed off quickly in wars of extinction. You’d think that something would have survived, but no.
Maybe the Nephites and Lamanites just didn’t build stuff as well as the Vikings. Or else fictional people don’t leave archaeological traces.
6 September 2011 at 4:20 am
That is gods way of making a game out of things, just like with the dinosaur bones 😛
If we had too much proof our faith would be undermined!