A Geographical Interlude

MDC Contents			With Lehi and his family having left the historically and geographically more comfortable Old World and arrived in the New, it is appropriate to spend just a little time on a subject that has been the fodder for numerous books, arguments, and living room discussions (with even a few Sunday School classes thrown in for good measure). What ought we to understand about the geography of the Book of Mormon in the New World? The very first admission that should be made is that the precise location of Book of Mormon events is completely unnecessary to the spiritual value of the book. The Book of Mormon was and will be the "most correct book" regardless of our opinions of its ties to the dirt. Nevertheless, the studies of the cultural/intellectual background of Israel at the time of Christ and the discovery of the Qumran writings and community provide an important backdrop for understanding New Testament Christianity. The work that has been done on tracing the Lehites' trail to Bountiful has also produced a depth of understanding and context. It is reasonable to assume that a geographical context for the Book of Mormon may do the same. We can understand the military tactics better if we understand the geography in which they might have taken place, and if we understand something of the culture area in which the Book of Mormon might have been placed in the New World, we may understand better some of the Lamanite/Nephite conflicts. Failing to tie the Book of Mormon to a real context leaves us with a text as separated from reality as Orson Scott Card's science fiction novels that are based on the Book of Mormon text. We might learn some lessons from them, but they lack the great depth that historical reality gives to the struggles and passions of the Book of Mormon peoples. With What Measure Ye Mete (Matt. 7:2) What ground rules should be applied to a consideration of Book of Mormon geography? The first is that the Book of Mormon is a real record of a real people who lived in a real time. As such, a correlation with the real world must understand the constraints of the real world. The first important issue here is the nature of the upheavals in the land after the crucifixion of Christ. The Book of Mormon describes great upheavals. What might their effect have been? John Sorenson examines this question: "The location of Cumorah is not the only question that will have come to the alert reader's mind. What if the physical conditions changed so much from ancient to modern times that the former locations no longer can be found? We learn from the Book of Mormon that "the face of the whole earth" was changed through terrible earthquakes and other destruction at the time of the Savior's crucifixion. Could it be that today there is no way to reconstruct the geography of pre-crucifixion times? The answer to that is also in the book. Mormon and Moroni both lived and wrote after the catastrophic changes. They had no trouble identifying locations they personally knew in their lifetimes with places referred to by Alma or Helaman before the catastrophe. Nothing about the pre-crucifixion geography seems to have puzzled them. The volume itself says that the changes at the Savior's death were mainly to the surface. Bountiful was still in place, its temple still there, when the resurrected Savior appeared (3 Nephi 11:1). Zarahemla was rebuilt on the burned ruin of the former city (4 Nephi 1:8). The narrow pass was still in its key position during the final battles as it had been more than four centuries before. The River Sidon ran the same course, and Ramah/Cumorah, the landmark hill, presided unchanged over the annihilation of its second people. Thus the record itself gives no justification for supposing that the form or nature of the land changed in any essentials, despite the impressive destruction that signaled the Savior's death. Nor is there reliable evidence from the earth sciences to lead us to suppose major changes took place. Nothing we know prevents our placing most of the ancient places on today's map." (Sorenson, AN ANCIENT AMERICAN SETTING FOR THE BOOK OF MORMON, 1985, p. 45. Our geography, then, must reasonably conform to known features and known time periods. We have experience in this world with catastrophic events, and while they certainly can change many features, most gross features of the land remain the same (Mount St. Helens looks quite different after its eruption but the rest of the Puget Sound remains the same). The next requisite is that we must understand the Book of Mormon in a context of other peoples and cultures. No matter where the Book of Mormon is placed in the New World, historical data indicates that there were people either there, or near there from before Book of Mormon times (including before Jaredite times). Just as the Book of Mormon must fit into a real geography, its peoples must fit into a real time. The evidence is very strong that most of the native Americans are genetically related to Asians rather than descended from the Middle East. The gross cultural underpinnings of ideology, philosophy, and religion of the majority of known Amerindian populations is decidedly similar to Asian rather than Near Eastern roots. From the Bering Strait to the Straits of Magellan, this hemisphere was populated before the arrival of the Jaredites. While there were certainly uninhabited areas, the gross land mass was clearly populated. The Book of Mormon must also fit into this reality. The Way to Judge is . . . Plan (Moro. 7:15) Various theories of Book of Mormon geography have been presented, and it is worth examining them to find their various strengths and weaknesses. The Hemispheric Model It is clear that the first mental model of the Book of Mormon geography covered the entire hemisphere, with the obvious narrow neck of land in Panama and the North American continent being the land northward and the South American continent the land southward. It is clear from numerous statements that this was the idea prevalent from the publication of the Book of Mormon until at least 1842 (Sorenson, John L. THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BOOK OF MORMON EVENTS: A SOURCE BOOK. 1990 p. 10). In this model, the hill Cumorah was the one in New York, and the various arrowheads found in that area were witnesses to the last battle of the Nephites that was held around Cumorah. In spite of the general acceptance of this model, it was not inflexibly held, and even Joseph Smith appeared to change his opinions somewhat after the publication of John Lloyd Stephens _Incidents of Travel in central America, Chiapas and Yucatan_ when the world became more aware and amazed at the ruins of the great civilizations of the Maya. (Sorenson 1990 p. 13-14 traces the effect of that volume on Book of Mormon geographical speculation). While the hemispheric model has the advantage of antiquity (in terms of church thought) it has significant problems. The most important is that the distances described in the Book of Mormon do not allow for a coverage to be as large as the entire hemisphere. Regardless of how willing populations were to travel, they simply could not cover the entire hemisphere in the time periods mentioned in the Book of Mormon. While the idea still has a few adherents, the majority of authors working on Book of Mormon geography have realized that the book itself cannot support the hemispheric model. We must look elsewhere. The South American model A few proposals have been made attempting to identify the South American continent with the Book of Mormon. Apparently the earliest was made by Heber Comer with some supervision by Karl G. Maeser (Sorenson 1990 p. 73). This earliest South American hypothesis runs afoul of the distance criteria, with most of the important events ocurring close to the Isthmus of Panama, but the landing site further south than travel times would allow (though it was likely based on the Chilean landing site proposition). A more modern attempt to see South American as the Book of Mormon lands provides a more reasonable geography. Arthur Kocherhans (Lehi's Isle of Promise, 1990) locates the action on the South American continent, but his reconstruction requires that all of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina had to have been underwater until the time of the crucifixion when they rose from the sea. While that hypothesis might provide an otherwise reasonable geography, dirt archaeology has clear evidence of thriving populations in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina at the time the hypothesis indicates that the land was underwater. Not only is the required alteration in the world's geography so dramatic that to have happened in such a short time the required forces would have destroyed the world, but the clear evidence is that it simply didn't happen. The Western New York model This model places all of the Book of Mormon action in Western New York with the Great Lakes serving as the seas. One of the models for this geography was proposed by Vernal Holley (Book of Mormon Authorship: A Closer Look. 1983) not to show that they Book of Mormon took place there, but to show that Joseph Smith must have stolen the names and geography from that area when he invented the Book of Mormon. A more faithful rendition of the same geography is Delbert W. Curtis' The Land of the Nephites (1988). The primary reason for examining the Western New York area for Holley is to show how Joseph Smith might have created the Book of Mormon geography from available information. For Curtis, the primary impetus is the desire to keep the New York hill Cumorah as the Book of Mormon hill while retaining a more logical distance scale than the entire hemisphere. While each of these geographies experiences problems when the entire corpus of Book of Mormon geographical references are coordinated with the region (including traveling up and down for relative height in the geography) perhaps the most telling disqualification of the Western New York region as a location for the Book of Mormon's lack of reference to snow. For those who have seen the Buffalo area on the evening news (and even more for those who have lived there) it is impossible to imagine a 1,000 year history of that region without any mention of snow, either in passing, or in direct reference to the difficulties of traveling it the snow. Whatever else the physical geography might have going for it, the climate does not match that of the Book of Mormon text. The Mesoamerican Model The model most widely accepted by serious scholars is the Mesoamerican model which places Book of Mormon action in a limited area around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The three most available descriptions of variations on this model are Sorenson's An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon, Richard Hauck's Deciphering the Geography of the Book of Mormon: Settlements and Routes in Ancient America, and Joseph Allen's Exploring the Lands of the Book of Mormon. The reasons for examining this area of the world for a Book of Mormon location are fairly clear. It is possible to find a narrow neck of land (the Ithsmus of Panama) and this area of the hemisphere is the location of the only known examples of indigenous writing systems. Because the Book of Mormon is de facto evidence of literacy, it makes some sense to begin looking in the only location on the hemisphere where there was a written language. The correlations are stronger than supposition, however, and include climate, topography, and correlations with known populations. From the standpoint of rigorous criteria that the Book of Mormon must fit into the real world, this geography is currently the best available fit. The Effect of a Plausible Geography on our Understanding of the Book of Mormon As previously indicated (and as should be obvious) this commentary assumes the Mesoamerican model, or the Limited Tehuantepec model (a more specific name for the same hypothesis) to be the most plausible location for Book of Mormon events. Accepting this geography requires the following changes in some concepts that have long been popular in the church: The Book of Mormon events are limited to a small area roughly the size of Israel (see Sorenson 1985 for a discussion of distances) rather than the entire Wester Hemisphere. The Book of Mormon describes the religious history of some of the people in that area rather than all native inhabitants of the Americas at all time periods. When the Lehites arrived, they arrived into a land that already had peoples and cultures - even though they are not explicitly mentioned (archaeological information is clear that they were there). The New York Cumorah is a symbolic remembrance of the Book of Mormon Cumorah/Ramah (see Sorenson 1985 for a discussion of this, and Palmer, David A. In Search of Cumorah: New Evidences for the Book of Mormon from Ancient Mexico.1981 for an identification of a Mesoamerican location a for Cumorah/Ramah).
			by Brant Gardner. Copyright 1998