During the last two decades, archaeological discoveries in Peru have exploded and the results are amazing. For centuries archaeologists ignored the ruins of the vast ancient empires that once ruled the Andes. In his book, 1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann writes: “Incredibly, the first full history of the fall of the Inka empire did not appear until more than three hundred years after the events it chronicled: William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru, published in 1847…. The book had no successor. ‘The Inka were largely ignored because the entire continent of South America was largely ignored,’ Patricia Lyon, an anthropologist at the Institute for Andean Studies at Berkeley, California, explained to me. Until the end of colonialism, she suggested, researchers tended to work in their own countries’ possessions. The British were in Africa, along with the Germans and the French. The Dutch were in Asia, and nobody was in South America.”
Fortunately, that has all changed in the last twenty years. The video in the link below shows some remarkable discoveries in Peru during just the last twelve months. Several of these discoveries are in harmony with what one would have expected of a Nephi civilization. Here is what I gleamed from this short video. The people in the Andes in Book of Mormon times:
1. Were a settled agricultural society (2 Nephi 5:11).
2.Cities and monumental buildings dated as far back as 3000 BC – the time of the early Jaredites.
3. Building walls were plastered – a form of cement (Helaman 3:7,9,11),
4. More buried step-pyramids, similar to ziggurats have been discovered in Peru. Ziggurats style pyramids are associates with Sumer, the original homeland of the Jaredites.
5. Cocoa (chocolate beans) were being cultivated and used in Peru 1500 years before they were used in Mesoamerica. The same was true of corn cultivation but not shown in this video. Again, it shows that technology flowed north from Peru to Mesoamerica, not the other way around.
6. The ancient people of the Andes were herdsmen and pet owners who cared for their animals, even healing them when they had broken bones. (2 Nephi 5:11). The Andean people owned large herds of llamas (horses), alpacas (the Spanish called sheep), etc. The only domesticated animals in pre-Columbian North and Central America were dogs, ducks, rabbits, and turkeys.
7. Finally, the archaeologists discovered (what locals including LDS missionaries already knew) that there were tunnels that ran for over a mile from the temple of Coricancha in the city of Cusco, Peru up to the great fortress of Sacsayhuaman due north of the city. The Book of Mormon tells of a resort (meaning fortress see- Alma 48) north of the city of Nephi where they could flee to during attacks. Like Sacsayhuaman, the Nephite fortress was on a hill north of Shilom (the part of the city Nephi controlled by the Nephites). Further, the Nephite resort had a tower, the same was found at Sacsayhuaman. It seems logical that the tunnels would have been used by the Nephites when they fled from the city up to the refuge where they could defend themselves.
And it came to pass that he caused many buildings to be built in the land Shilom; and he caused a great tower to be built on the hill north of the land Shilom, which had been a resort for the children of Nephi at the time they fled out of the land. (Mosiah 11:13)
You can watch the video by clicking on this link.