Troy, the Book of Mormon, and Scholarly Peer Review

I was just reading a piece of anti-Mormon writing in which the author claims that, if the Book of Mormon were really historically authentic and if its geography actually existed in the real world, Mormon scholars should be able to prove it in a peer-reviewed non-Mormon publication.  This, the author declares, is the very scientific process that was used to find the ancient city of Troy, so famous from Homer’s Iliad.

It’s a very naïve and simplistic view of how such scholarship works, but I’ve pretty much despaired of convincing determined non-scholars of that fact.

I’ll just say this:  The “scientific process” described above is precisely not how Troy was located.  Anybody who actually knows the story of Heinrich Schliemann knows that it bears little resemblance at all to the idealized utopia of objective, peer-reviewed scholarship sketched above.