Increasingly, it is apparent that war practices in use when the Europeans arrived go back to the very early history of Mesoamerica. Yet as late as ten years ago, most of the published descriptions of early life in the area directly contradicted this view. Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. Claude F. Baudez and Pierre Becquelin, Etudes Mesoameriques, Vol. Some Results of the Palo Blanco Project, University of Michigan, Museum of Anthropology Technical Reports, no.
Further support comes from other recent discoveries about palisade-like structures.
He describes how easy it has been for researchers to overlook the remnants of dirt and timber structures, but discusses the trenches, the soil changes, the growth of aligned trees, and other clues that point to their previous existence. The site he discovered, in addition to extensive arrays of palisades, also had an identifiable long and narrow pass, consistent with Book of Mormon descriptions, lined with palisades for a long distance, apparently presenting the only way into the fortified area. Attacking armies entering the pass would be prey to defenders along the palisades. Certainly forts of timber were built by armies in the early days of the United States, but I am unaware of anything quite like the trench and palisade systems described in the Book of Mormon that Joseph would have known about and could have borrowed from his own experience to fabricate the Book of Mormon. Indeed, even a cursory reading of the war chapters in the Book of Mormon reveals that the battles there are quite foreign to anything a farm boy in New York would have experienced.