How Could Joseph Smith Write So Accurately about Ancient American Civilization?
“). The very existence of the great Mesoamerican civilizations was outside the knowledge of most people in the United States until the publication of a popular book by John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (New York, 1841), which came into the hands of Church leaders in 1842. The biographer of Stephens wrote that: The acceptance of an “Indian civilization” demanded, to an American living in 1839 [when the first edition of Stephens appeared in England], an entire reorientation, for to him, an Indian was one of those barbaric, tepee dwellers against whom wars were constantly waged…. Nor did one ever think of calling the other [e.g., Mesoamerican] indigenous inhabitants of the continent “civilized.” In the universally accepted opinion [of that day], they were like their North American counterparts — savages. [Victor Wolfgang Von Hagen, Maya Explorer: The Life of John Lloyd Stephens, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948, p. 75]
