Metal Plates

I just started listening to a talk by Brenton G. Yorgason entitled Little-Known Evidences of the Book of Mormon.  In it he mentions Franklin S. Harris Jr. who conducted a study called "Old World Writing on Metal Plates."  According to this study, there have been 62 different sets of metal plates unearthed since the time that Joseph Smith claimed to have found the gold plates upon which the Book of Mormon was originally written.  Of these 62 sets of plates, 19 were written on plates of gold or gold alloy; the rest were silver, copper, or bronze.  Many of these sets of plates were found in large stone boxes that had been cemented together, just as the box in which the Book of Mormon was hidden was described by Joseph Smith in Joseph Smith--History 1:52.

This study validates the story of Joseph Smith by showing that it was not unheard of for the records of ancient peoples to be written upon plates of metal and to be hidden in the earth the way he described.