How a Mormon lawyer transformed archaeology in Mexico

In 2014 I went to an archeological site called Izapa
and I was walking around with the archaeologist
who was excavating there and she pointed out a
particular monument that she said that
a lot of Mormon tourists came to visit
because they felt that it represented a scene
from the Book of Mormon and I was stunned
I mean I just thought that was very strange
and really interesting
and it led me down this whole rabbit hole of
Mormon interests in archaeology at Mesoamerica
I'm Lizzy Wade and
I'm a contributing correspondent for Science magazine
So what sort of the point that everyone knows about
the Book of Mormon is that after Jesus's death and
resurrection he appears to inhabitants of the Americas
but actually there's thousands of years of
history around that sort of centering on these
different tribes that come from the near east,
the Nephites and Lamanites
the Book of Mormon has some sort of vague
references to geography, it talks about an isthmus,
it talks about a major river, so people have,
looked for correspondences between that geography
and the geography of the real world
and a lot of people believe that this narrow isthmus
that's discussed in the Book of Mormon
is the Isthmus of Tehuantepec which
is the narrow part of Mexico and
particularly of interest here is the
state of Chiapas, which is the
southernmost state of Mexico.
so after I went to Izapa
and found out that there was Mormon
interest in the archaeology of southern Mexico
I just kept asking archaeologists about it
I eventually found the story of
the founder of an archaeological foundation
that continues to work in Mexico
a man named Thomas Stewart Ferguson who was a
Mormon and a lawyer in California
he never trained in archaeology but when he
was an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley
in the thirties he became
really interested in Mesoamerica and
how it related to the Book of Mormon
and he particularly became interested
in testing some ideas about where the
Book of Mormon took place and so he
started this archaeological foundation called
the New World Archaeological Foundation
that is headquartered in Chiapas even today
and is now under the umbrella of BYU
which is the Mormon University in Utah
So Ferguson went down to Mesoamerica several times
to sort of look for these artifacts
Throughout the 50s he was very optimistic
that proof of the Book of Mormon
was about to be discovered literally any day
That never happened, it didn't happen during his life
and it hasn't happened since and
he sort of gradually grew a little disillusioned it seems
like from his letters which I read and
in archives in Utah
really what the moment of true shift for him
was when these Egyptian papyri that
Joseph Smith had translated into Scripture
called the Book of Abraham were
rediscovered at the Met in New York
when he hired an Egyptotologist
to translate these texts without telling them anything about
what he was hoping to hear back from them they said
these are authentic ancient Egyptian texts
but they're from The Book of the Dead
which is basically the most common text in that culture
it's an all these all the graves so from that Ferguson I
his faith seems to have immediately disappeared
it was totally undermined by this discovery
so what's special about the
New World Archaeological Foundation is that
from the time it was founded by Ferguson
it focused on a region and on a time period
that scientists really hadn't been that interested in and
that region is sort of the middle and the
Pacific coast of Chiapas
In the northern part of Chiapas there are
amazing Mayan pyramids,
beautiful glyphs, beautiful ruins,
just incredible cities, but in the center and
sort of the southern coast of Chiapas
you don't really get that
this region was particularly important right after 2000 BC
This time period, which is called the formative period,
it's right when people start settling down in villages
after being hunter-gatherers, but this
the archeology especially compared to like
the ruins of Mayan cities
had been considered not that exciting
because it's a lot of earthworks,
a lot of very early ceramics
so as this foundation NWAF directed
many really large-scale excavations
in the 50s and 60s, the key sites are
Chiapa de Corso and Izapa
and thanks to them we really know a lot about the
beginnings of civilization in Mesoamerica
and you know a region that
turned out to be a very interesting crossroads
for a bunch of different people
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How a Mormon lawyer transformed archaeology in Mexico—and ended up losing his faith

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