Mormonism was born from archeology was born from treasure hunting

Archeology has its roots in religious treasure hunting and colonization.
So does Mormonism.
 
In 1827, Joseph said he unearthed the Gold Plates (the Book of Mormon source material) in a magical dig. The year prior Joseph was arrested for defrauding locals with his mystic buried treasure seeking. For both of these digs he used a magical seer stone which he also found while digging for treasure.
 
Seven years later Joseph is desecrating graves as he and his paramilitary are “wandering over the plains'' of the Osage, Sauk and Meskwaki, Peoria, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Myaamia, Kiikaapoi, Kaskaskia, and Bowéwadmi. Joseph tells his followers that they are “roving over the mounds of (the Nephites), picking up their skulls and their bones, as a proof of (the Book of Mormon’s) divine authenticity.”
 
Mormons believe the bones buried in this Indigenous Mound belong to a white Lamanite named Zelph. But Lincoln said these Mounds were filled with the bones of an ancient race of giants. So 🤷🏼 (see: moundbuilder myth and vanishing indian myth)
 
Because Mormons believed this racist moundbuilder myth, some non-Mormon settlers played a prank. Settlers engraved six small brass plates, called the Kinderhook plates, with some unusual characters. They then buried them in an Indigenous Mound and later “discovered” them there in 1843.
 
Joseph taught that these were written by a Jaredite, one of the descendants of Ham: (who Mormons believe was Black-skin-cursed ancestor of African Peoples). Many Mormons believe the Olmec were these Black/African Jaredites. There are 24 articles about this on the Book of Mormon Archeology Forum website.
 
119 years after (1962) this “discovery,” church-owned Improvement Era magazine stated the Kinderhook plates were authentic.

By 1981, Church stated that the plates were a hoax, and asserted "There is no evidence that the Prophet Joseph Smith ever took up the matter with the Lord, as he did when working with the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham."
 
The Book of Abraham was also an archeological hoax. But this time the document was authentic, and the translation was made up.

In 1835, Joseph Smith bought 4 Egyptian mummies and some papyri that were stolen by one of Napoleon’s “antiquities excavators.” Joseph taught that “one of the [papyri] contained the writings of Abraham, another the writings of Joseph of Egypt”

From one of these he made the Book of Abraham which contains some of the more fantastic Mormon cosmology like Premortal Existence, God lives on Kolob, and matter existed before God.

This papyri was lost and later found in the archeological-treasure-filled Met. In 2014, an Egyptologist found them to be funerary texts. Yet, this Church continues to hold the Book of Abraham as scripture because God works in mysterious ways.

Maybe God just told Joseph what to write? Like when Joseph “translated” the Book of Mormon by looking at a rock in a hat.

Joseph Smith dictating the Book of Mormon. His seer stone is inside the hat telling him what to say.

Maybe both are hoaxes from a fraudulent treasure seeker?

If Joseph was a hoaxter, he had a hoaxian-descendant in the famous Mormon forger, Mark Hofmann. Hofmann exploited this Church’s obsession with its history by forging and selling Church history documents to them–like the Salamander letter. This letter said that the Angel Moroni was in fact a white salamander. Five years after this Church knew the Kinderhook plates were fake, this Church released this letter as authentic, even sending it to seminary teachers.

Hofmann reminds me of Smith in that they both exploited cultural obsessions with mythistories. In the 19th century U.S., many colonists wondered how Indigenous People and the Americas fit into the Bible, as the Bible is BAE. One popular theory was that Indigenous Peoples were of the lost ten tribes of Israel.

Because of white-supremacy, it was also a pop-culture to theorize about an extinct race of white People or giants or ancient Isrealis who built the Indigenous architectures of this land.

Then amid these absurd and racist curiosities came the Book of Mormon, some hoax plates in a desecrated burial mound and some papyri that was only in the U.S. because colonial desecration of graves.

​Colonization, white-Christian-supremacy, and desecration is why and how Mormonism exists.