The Book of Mormon never claims that everyone died in the Americas at AD ~400. Nor does it claim that its account of the peoples there is comprehensive. In fact, it says the opposite: that splinter groups settled elsewhere, that there were other bands of people in the land, and that after the destruction of the Nephites, the millions of remaining Lamanites continued to sprawl over the land.

And it also says things like horses, chariots, steel, and other anachronistic things existed in the pre-Columbian Americas. There is no evidence (to date) to support any of those claims. You might want to look into the history of NWAF and Thomas Ferguson. Michael Coe, a renowned expert in this field and also mentioned on this post, was friends with Ferguson. It's an interesting history.

> And it also says things like horses, chariots, steel, and other anachronistic things existed in the pre-Columbian Americas. There is no evidence (to date) to support any of those claims.

Horses definitively existed in (far enough) precolumbian America. The dominant belief seems to be that they died out (perhaps due to human hunting) at or shortly after the end of the Pleistocene, ca. 10-12kya, but there is some evidence there may have been some populations around as late as ca. 3kya, IIRC.

EDIT: of course, one must keep in mind that the horses of precolumbian America were much smaller than Old World horses, so it's not really plausible that they'd be being ridden, pulling chariots, or generally being used like Old World horses even if it is (just barely) plausible that they were around at the right time.

John Sorenson ( Professor of Anthropology at BYU) addresses most of your speculations in this article. I found his responses very well written: https://www.fairmormon.org/archive/publications/an-open-lett...

I should have qualified that with "during the Book of Mormon timeline".

3kya is just about at the Book of Mormon timeline.

Just about is fair but still short by ~400 years, unless you count the Jaredites. They purportedly fled the Old World around the time of the Tower of Babel (~2000 BCE IIRC?).

EDIT: I wasn't sure if the Book of Ether even mentioned horses, but it did, along with elephants. [1]

[1] https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/ether/9.19?lang=eng&clan...

Could it be that maybe some things were lost in translation? Maybe a “chariot” isn’t exactly the way we think of a chariot now. Maybe it was just a saddle?

You might want to look into the loose vs. tight translation theories. There are resulting consequences with sticking with either one.

There certainly is, you just have to look for it. https://bookofmormoncentral.org/blog/new-evidence-for-horses...

> While the evidence for horses in pre-Columbian America is encouraging, it still requires some caution. Additional C-14 dating from other samples will be needed to change the prevailing view. Until then, this evidence should be considered provisional, but promising.

And was that peer reviewed?

You may find the responses in this article intriguing: https://www.fairmormon.org/archive/publications/an-open-lett...

Not being critical, only pointing out every time their is a big discovery like this, some level of time and effort is spent trying to align the discovery with the BOM. The wiki article has a lot of references in it that are related to the topic.

You might enjoy this recent Science story:

"How a Mormon lawyer transformed archaeology in Mexico—and ended up losing his faith"

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/how-mormon-lawyer-tra...