[Saturday, August 22, 1959.] Spetn a good part of the morning in a conference with Brothers
Crockett and [John] Bernhard on the question of whether we should establish an
Institute of Archaeology at BYU. The feeling was that we did not have
sufficiently trained archaeologists on our staff to do so.
We discussed also the question of whether we should propose to the
First Presidency a large excavation program in Central America to verify the
Book of Mormon. Our feeling was that people will believe in the Book of Mormon
largely through faith rather than scientific evidence, that materials written so
far by Tom Ferguson, Milton Hunter, Wells Jakeman and others are so biased that
they will not stand the tst of objective archaeological conclusions, and that
if we are to do further exvacating it should be done largely by non-Mormons who
will merely give descriptions of that they find, leaving the world to make
conclusions. It was agreed I would present to the First Presidency the
questions of whether they went to spend considerable money for this effort. (Ernest
L. Wilkinson, Journal, August 22, 1959, in Educating Zion: The Diaries of
BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, 1951-1971, ed. Gary James Bergera [Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 2025], 246-47)
Further Reading:
John Gee, “The Hagiography of
Doubting Thomas”
Daniel C.
Peterson and Matthew Roper, “Ein Heldenleben? On
Thomas Stuart Ferguson as an Elias for Cultural Mormons”
Daniel C.
Peterson, “On the
New World Archaeological Foundation”
