Bluejay

Hi, Hemidakota. The struggle isn't in deciding whether or how to ask, but in determining whether or not an answer has come, and what the answer means when it has come. Where I personally stand at this point, I don't think an answer has come yet. It may have come, and I just missed it, but I have received no indication of that yet. The best that can be done in the absence of confirmation is to study it ourselves.

Hi, the Ogre. Thanks for your response. Well, don't ruin my enthusiasm for it. ---- Allow me to respectfully disagree. I've personally done genetics research (though I've since siwtched over to ecology), and I'm not sure what you're talking about: there's a lot of power in genetics, and interpretation is usually pretty straightforward. However, since the topic is about archaeological evidence, I won't pursue the genetics argument any further here. ----- Have you heard of Rodney Meldrum? He did some research and made a video presentation about the Great Lakes model for the BoM (you can read a little about it at bookofmormonevidence.org, although you have to buy the video to actually get any of his actual work). Though he's not a professional researcher, and his presentation is apologetics with a number of errors, he's able to present a fairly good argument from scant archaeological cues. For instance, Nephite cities were probably not built of stone, but of wood (burning was the method of choice for destroying cities in the BoM; and Moroni's fortifications were made of timbers, which is a peculiar choice if stone or brick is available). Furthermore, a few Zion's Camp journals cited Joseph Smith as referring to the eastern US as the "lands of the Nephites." Of course, the mysterious origins of the Hopewell civilization also serve as excellent fodder for the apologetics crowd, and the dates of the Hopewell civilization are consistent with Alma's escape from King Noah and the destruction of the Nephites. I'm not sure how the Jaredites fit in with this model, though, and I don't think anybody has done anything in that direction yet (none that I've seen, anyway).

Has anybody here done much reading on the Hopewell interpretation of the Book of Mormon? Basically, it's the idea that the BoM happened in the Great Lakes region, and that the Hopewell civilization of the Eastern United States matches the profile of the Nephite civilization. I think it fits the BoM scenario much better than the Central American interpretations. Although there is currently no conclusive support for the BoM from genetics, the closest that can be found is a weak genetic link between peoples of the Great Lakes region and the Druze people from the Middle East. This link is more consistent with the Beringian Strait model than the BoM model for the peopling of North America, but it's certainly a whole lot better than any genetic evidence that can be gleaned from Central America.