1: An Excellent Survey of Mesoamerican Art and Culture
Note: You're "helpful" votes are appreciated. One Mormon reader likes to automatically give my reviews negative votes because of my negative reviews of books on the Book of Mormon. Oh, well, and Thanks.
Miller's book is a must for anyone interested in the cultures of ancient Mexico and Central America (mesoamerica). It is full of quality photos of the artifacts and ruins. Miller points out many errors.
One picture, for example, shows an Olmec figure holding a child on its lap. "Mexican peasants who found this large greenstone sculpture near las Limas, Veracruze, believed it to be a madonna and child. In fact, it represents a youth holding an Olmec rain deity in his lap."
As for the theories that became popular in the 19th century, Miller dismisses them with the observation that "these claims are made by those unwilling to accept the modern Mesoamerican peasant as the descendant of creators of high culture. Although the question of contact remains unanswered in all its details, by and large it will be assumed here that ideas, inventions, and civilizations arose independently in the New World."
This is another way of pointing out the glaring racism of those who demand an Old World origin of Native American culture.
The claims of the Book of Mormon that there were great Hebrew-Christian civilizations in ancient America are without basis in reality. It is one thing the argue that contact influenced a given culture, but it is an entirely different thing to argue that any civilization in the New World was derived from the Old World.
In thumbing Miller's book, the reader is confronted with the pagan reality of ancient mesoamerica, where the rain gods ruled and human sacrifice was practiced by the Olmecs, the Maya, and the Aztecs. No amount of clever manipulation of the facts by Mormon authors will change this fact.
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