Mittens wrote:Interestingly enough, in December 1970 Ferguson was considering writing a book on the Book of Mormon that would be, he said, "a real bombshell." He worked on the project through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. His premise was that the Book of Mormon was a 19th century work and that Mormonism was a made-up religion with Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and Oliver Cowdery as the perpetrators. On his last trip to Mexico in February 1983, Ferguson told archeologist Pierre Agrinier Bach that he was working on an almost-completed manuscript that "would (according to him) expose Joseph Smith as a fraud." Yet, as Larson writes, "Ferguson's unexpected death in 1983 stopped his efforts, and inexplicably, his final manuscript has to date never surfaced." One can only wonder if this manuscript has been suppressed by his family, which has publicly maintained that Ferguson was a faithful Latter-day Saint to his death.
There may be something to such claims, and the family was opposed to his heterodox views. However, having myself received an assemblage of his views (directly from him) on the Book of Mormon in early 1975, I can say with great assurance that he took a very unprofessional, even ignorant approach to the question of Book of Mormon historicity. I was frankly surprised at the shallowness of it -- something which would not be surprising from a high school sophomore.
A valuable part of Larson's book is chapter 5 ("Book of Mormon Archaeological Tests") and Appendix A ("Thomas Stuart Ferguson on Book of Mormon Archaeology"). In these chapters Larson shows Ferguson's list of problems with the Book of Mormon, including the Book of Mormon's mentioning of plants, animal life (including horses and elephants), and metals that were not indigenous to the Americas. As Larson writes on page 213, "While the absence of archaeological evidence can never disprove the Book of Mormon, it does cast some suspicion on it, especially since the plant, animal, technological, and literary evidence during the Preclassic time period in Mesoamerican paints a clearer picture year by year."
Dr. Stan Larson is a very nice guy (I have met him and discussed matters with him on several occasions over the years), but he is not an archeologist, and completely misunderstands the application of archeology to the Book of Mormon. For a correct approach to that issue, one should see John Sorenson's
Mormon's Codex, which will be out shortly from the Maxwell Institute.