"Behold, I say unto you, that you must rely upon my word, which if you do with full purpose of heart, you shall have a view of the plates, and also of the breastplate, the sword of Laban, the Urim and Thummim, which were given to the brother of Jared upon the mount, when he talked with the Lord face to face, and the miraculous directors which were given to Lehi while in the wilderness, on the borders of the Red Sea."
Two points on this passage, one short, one long, and then a question:
1. Many revelations to the Prophet Joseph Smith came by way of instruction, not future-casting. Of the more properly "prophetic" revelations, some are conditional. But if the test of a prophet's truth is in his fruits, this Section ought to count as a conditional prophecy that was fulfilled. Anyone challenging a believer to point to a prophecy the supposed prophet made that came true, can logically and rightfully point to this one in all its particulars.
2. This Messianic revelation addresses the three who would later become the Book of Mormon's 3 witnesses. There were 8 others, whose experience was different, added to the first and all subsequent printings. Balanced thinkers may be frustrated that the plates and other artifacts were taken up into an angel's possession and are no longer available to examine archeologically, but the nature of the testimonies of both sets of witnesses complement each other logically, according to standards of law and logic, and put the lie to the many creative and plausible, but ultimately discredited critiques that have attempted explanations other than the one Smith gave on his own.
The plates were not a figment of his imagination. Credible people, many of whom later had personal incentives to discredit the story, stuck to their witness that the plates were material, weighed what they should, had characters on them, containing a record of some kind.
It was not a mere conspiracy of believers. Besides the aforementioned fact that people who fell away from belief in the subsequently Restored Church, or from belief in Smith as a prophet, nonetheless did not recant their testimony of the Book of Mormon's reality and truth already establishes this fact. But the fact that 3 saw an angel, heard the voice of the God, and saw artifacts mentioned in the plates' narratives with their own eyes, and the other 8 did not, allows analysis to straddle both spiritual and objective standards of truth. Mass delusions or shared visions are incredibly rare. But it would be hard to claim two separate mass delusions for different pools of believers on different dates, especially when the nature of their experience was so strikingly different, the latter being almost scientific in its objectivity and modesty of claims. But even in the more religious testimony, the claims deserve logical weight: by what skill and from what materials could Joseph Smith have otherwise fabricated or procured even plausible forgeries for not just the plates themselves, but the sword of Laban, the seer stones and breastplate of the brother of Jared, and the Liahona?
3. I think I need more archeologist friends. I have a conjecture--not even really a full hypothesis, really--about why those specific artifacts. My curiosity is about whether it is an attested practice from ancient times when the authenticity of accounts would have been harder to verify that historians compile artifacts that are mentioned within their accounts. And if so, why choose from the beginning of the accounts and not amass them all along as new mentions gather and the history unfolds? Why do we not have the javelin of Teancum, or Moroni's title of liberty, or a tile from the wall on which Amulek's ancestor Aminadi interpreted the writing of the finger of the Lord? Why do we have the Liahona from Lehi's first years in the wilderness, Laban's sword from the first days of his family's departure from Jerusalem, and stones from the Jaredites' first prophet, and nothing from the intervening historical events?
One attempt at a hypothesis might be that for someone to carry something from the beginning of a record forward to its end and sealing up is a way to establish that the entire record--passed from generation to generation as it was--was kept sacred, safe, and integral from beginning to end.
Honestly I can't think of any other analog, but I suspect that something like this must have been a practice among some ancient peoples.
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