“The Book of Mormon talks about ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgical industries. A ferrous industry is a whole system of doing something. It’s just not an esoteric process that a few people are involved in, but ferrous industry … means mining iron ores and then processing these ores and casting [them] into irons … This is a process that’s very complicated … it also calls for cultural backup to allow such an activity to take place … In my recent reading of the Book of Mormon, I find that iron and steel are mentioned in sufficient context to suggest that there was a ferrous industry here … You can’t refine ore without leaving a bloom of some kind or impurities that blossom out and float to the top of the ore…and also the flux of limestone or whatever is used to flux the material … [This] blooms off into silicas and indestructible new rock forms. In other words, when you have a ferroused metallurgical industry, you have these evidences of the detritus that is left over. You also have the fuels, you have the furnaces, you have whatever technologies that were there performing these tasks; they leave solid evidences. And they are indestructible things … No evidence has been found in the new world for a ferrous metallurgical industry dating to pre-Columbian times. And so this is a king-size kind of problem, it seems to me, for the so-called Book of Mormon archaeology. This evidence is absent.”

^{Ray T. Matheny, Sunstone Symposium 6, “Book of Mormon Archaeology” (Salt Lake City, UT: Sunstone, 25 August 1984), UNVERIFIED.}