Thomas Stuart Ferguson and Mormon archaeology

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Questions

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• Critics claim that "Mormon archaeologist" Thomas Stuart Ferguson lost his testimony because he couldn't find any archaeological evidence for the Book of Mormon.

To see citations to the critical sources for these claims, [[../CriticalSources|click here]]

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Answer

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Ferguson was not an archaeologist; he was an amateur with an inaccurate idea of what archaeology could accomplish.

Detailed Analysis

As John Sorensen, who worked with Ferguson, recalled:

[Stan] Larson implies that Ferguson was one of the "scholars and intellectuals in the Church" and that "his study" was conducted along the lines of reliable scholarship in the "field of archaeology." Those of us with personal experience with Ferguson and his thinking knew differently. He held an undergraduate law degree but never studied archaeology or related disciplines at a professional level, although he was self-educated in some of the literature of American archaeology. He held a naive view of "proof," perhaps related to his law practice where one either "proved" his case or lost the decision; compare the approach he used in his simplistic lawyerly book One Fold and One Shepherd. His associates with scientific training and thus more sophistication in the pitfalls involving intellectual matters could never draw him away from his narrow view of "research." (For example, in April 1953, when he and I did the first archaeological reconnaissance of central Chiapas, which defined the Foundation's work for the next twenty years, his concern was to ask if local people had found any figurines of "horses," rather than to document the scores of sites we discovered and put on record for the first time.) His role in "Mormon scholarship" was largely that of enthusiast and publicist, for which we can be grateful, but he was neither scholar nor analyst.

Ferguson was never an expert on archaeology and the Book of Mormon (let alone on the book of Abraham, about which his knowledge was superficial). He was not one whose careful "study" led him to see greater light, light that would free him from Latter-day Saint dogma, as Larson represents. Instead he was just a layman, initially enthusiastic and hopeful but eventually trapped by his unjustified expectations, flawed logic, limited information, perhaps offended pride, and lack of faith in the tedious research that real scholarship requires. The negative arguments he used against the Latter-day Saint scriptures in his last years display all these weaknesses.

Larson, like others who now wave Ferguson's example before us as a case of emancipation from benighted Mormon thinking, never faces the question of which Tom Ferguson was the real one. Ought we to respect the hard-driving younger man whose faith-filled efforts led to a valuable major research program, or should we admire the double-acting cynic of later years, embittered because he never hit the jackpot on, as he seems to have considered it, the slot-machine of archaeological research? I personally prefer to recall my bright-eyed, believing friend, not the aging figure Larson recommends as somehow wiser.^[1]

More information about Ferguson can be found here:

• John Gee, "The Hagiography of Doubting Thomas (Review of Quest for the Gold Plates: Thomas Stuart Ferguson's Archaeological Search for the Book of Mormon)," FARMS Review of Books 10/2 (1998): 158–183. off-site
• Daniel C. Peterson and Matthew Roper, "Ein Heldenleben? On Thomas Stuart Ferguson as an Elias for Cultural Mormons (Review of: Quest for the Gold Plates: Thomas Stuart Ferguson’s Archaeological Search for the Book of Mormon)," FARMS Review 16/1 (2004): 175–220. off-site
• Daniel C. Peterson, "On the New World Archaeological Foundation (Review of: Behind the Mask of Mormonism)," FARMS Review 16/1 (2004): 221–234. off-site

== Notes ==

1. [note]  * John L. Sorenson, "Addendum," to John Gee, "A Tragedy of Errors (Review of By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus: A New Look at the Joseph Smith Papyri by Charles M. Larson," FARMS Review of Books 4/1 (1992): 93–119. off-site

Further reading and additional sources responding to these claims