Ancient Walls in North America? – Part I

The various cultures collectively termed "Mound Builders" were prehistoric, indigenous inhabitants of North America who, during a claimed 5,000-year period, constructed various styles of earthen mounds for religious, ceremonial, burial, and elite residential purposes. Theorists who cite North America as the location of Lehi’s Land of Promise have used this information to build their theory of Book of Mormon peoples’ occupation of the land.

The closest mound to the hill Cumorah in New York is at Newark, 9 miles away

 

An entire theory of Jaredite and Nephite possession of the land has thus been built on the presence of earthen mounds throughout the middle and some eastern states. The theorists’ claim these mounds were used for defense, and used as reference when Moroni was “throwing up banks of earth round about, to enclose his armies” (Alma 48:8).

However, the problem with this theory as it is with all theories, is that once an opinion is stated, there is a strong tendency to try and support it, rather than looking elsewhere when evidence to the contrary is found.

As an example, North American theorists, especially those who site the mound builders, have placed themselves in a difficult position—having stated emphatically that the Book of Mormon time period corresponds to the archaeological phases of the Late Archaic period (2500 to 1000 BC) being the Jaredites, and the Hopewell time period (100 BC until around 500 AD) being the Nephites, there was a period of time in between when the Adena, another mound-building people, ruled (1000 BC to 300 AD). Thus, these theorists had to claim there was an overlap and interaction between the Jaredites and the Nephites (David D. Robinson, Who Built the "Old Fort" on Bare Hill, The Crooked Lake Review, Keuka Lake, New York, 1997).

However, the Book of Mormon leaves no room for someone else to have existed between the Jaredites and the Nephites, so the theorists have to say that the Adena were a Jaredite and Nephite combination—that is, both peoples existed at the same time and interacted with one another. The problem is, there is no verification, reference or even hint of this in the scriptural record that these two civilizations had anything to do with each other, nor even that they lived at the same time.

From the hill Cumorah, the Jefferson County mound is 130 miles, and the Cooperstown mound is 154 miles. Nether are impressive

 

To strengthen their claim, North American theorists claim that there are significant ancient walls and trenches in the area of the hill in Manchester they call Cumorah, and that people have gathered thousands of arrowheads in the valley west of the hill—as well as on the hill itself. They also claim that the Book of Mormon places a town or city nearby.

These three claims of theorists do not stand up against scriptural and historical facts. Even some theorists disclaim the area in North America. John E. Clark, a professor at BYU in the archaeology department, has stated: “The archaeology of New York—and specifically the Hill Cumorah—is persuasive evidence that Book of Mormon peoples did not live in that region. By implication, the Cumorah of the golden plates is not the Cumorah of the final battles—Mormon’s hill and Moroni’s hill are not one and the same (John E. Clark “Archaeology and Cumorah Questions,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, vol.13, no.1, BYU, Provo, 2004, pp144–151, 174).

While it is true that there are rare examples of ancient forts and trenches, such as Old Fort on Bare Hill in Middlesex, New York, 28 miles south of the hill Cumorah in Manchester, is claimed to be older than the Seneca (1000 AD), however, while the Seneca—part of the confederacy of Six Nations known as the Haudenosaunee called by others the Iroquois confederacy—encountered in the 1700s claimed they had not built the fort, the Seneca as a people date back to 1000 AD, and likely did and built several things unknown to their descendants, 700 years later.

It might be of interest to know that while South Hill, known to the Seneca as Nundawao and located at the head of Lake Canandaigua produced Seneca artifacts, Bear Hill, known to the Seneca as Genundewah, produced artifacts from a cultural group described as Algonkin, an Indigenous people of Eastern Canada down through eastern New York along the Atlantic Coast. The point is, there is really no knowledge of this “fort” that is now nothing but rubble, nor indication it was actually a fort, let alone that it would have dated nearly 1000 years earlier.

Rock walls have been found in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine, all hundreds of miles from the Cumorah area. 

A forest grown up around a two-foot-high stone wall in Grafton, Vermont. This is the archetype wall for the crystalline metamorphic terrain of southern New England: a classic farmstead wall consisting of a single, un-coursed tier of stacked stone

 

According to Robert M. Thorson, a University of Connecticut geology professor and an expert on New England stone walls, big families with teenage boys, were put to work picking stones if they didn’t have another job to do. “They’d go build stone walls because they had that youthful testosterone and aggression,” Thorson said. As he noted in Stone by Stone, “The average farmer probably spent twenty-two times as much effort to heat his home as to clear his fields of stone.” Much of the work was done in the “off season,” when sowing and hoeing and harvesting weren’t on the agenda. Late fall and early winter were prime time for wall construction – before the snow came and the ground froze. He added that “New England fences were regulated by towns and generally were required to be four feet, six inches to five feet, six inches tall to keep cows out of the neighbors’ corn. “There are very few stone walls in the woods that are that high. They’re basically knee-high to thigh-high. That means they were not fences or walls in and of themselves” (Joe Rankin, “Writtren in Stone,” Northern Woodlands, Lyme, New Hampshire, Summer 2018). They were certainly not defensive walls, either.

(See the next post, “Ancient Walls in North America? – Part II,” for more of the comments made by theorists regarding their interpretation of the meaning) for the rest of the information regarding theorist claims that North America is the location of Lehi’s Land of Promise)