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THE PROBLEMS WITH IDENTIFYING BOOK OF MORMON LANDS

1. Is there any value in attempting to locate Book of Mormon Lands? 

The First Presidency (highest leaders) of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, have never had, and do not currently have, any official position on where most events mentioned in the Book of Mormon took place, other than somewhere in the Americas. The only endorsed locations are Jerusalem and surrounding landscape in ancient Israel (mentioned in 1st Nephi in the first part of the Book of Mormon), and upstate New York, where Joseph Smith claimed he received the ancient record of the Book of Mormon from an angel in 1820 A.D. This angel, named Moroni, had deposited the book, written on metal plates that had the appearance of gold, in a stone box under a large rock or small boulder on a hill near Palmyra, New York. Similarly, other than these two positions, I have no final opinion on any exact geographic location mentioned in the Book of Mormon, nor will I until the First Presidency of The Church offers an official position. At present I only examine candidates for such locations.

The first question that should be addressed is whether or not there is any value in identifying Book of Mormon locations. This question deals with two different groups of people, or two different audiences. The first audience are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who already have that conviction, that testimony I described earlier in the preface of this book. For this audience, I write from the perspective and assumption that the Book of Mormon is an authentic and true record of a colony of Christians (and offshoots from that colony), that lived somewhere in the ancient Americas. I start by asking the question, Why? Why study where Book of Mormon lands may have been located? For this group, the purpose of this series is not to provide testimony. True testimony can only come in one way, through the Holy Spirit of God, after carefully reading the Book of Mormon, and praying to God to know if it is true (as is instructed in Moroni 10:3-5), and receiving a witness of the Holy Ghost in one’s mind and soul (see Galatians 5:22, John 14:26, Doctrine and Covenants 6:23, 9:8-9). For those who already believe, what is this series for then? President of The Church, Russell M. Nelson stated that “study of the Book of Mormon is most rewarding when one focuses on its primary purpose—to testify of Jesus Christ.” and that “its stories, its people, or its vignettes of history. . . its language structure or its records of weapons, geography, animal life, techniques of building, or systems of weights and measures” by comparison are issues that are “incidental” (Russell M. Nelson, Conference Report, Ensign Magazine, October 1999 issue). 

What would be the value then in such studies? President Nelson in a later year went on to describe visiting the Holy Land with his family as “life changing” (October 2002 General Conference address, Ensign Magazine). While visiting Israel, Neal Armstrong is reported to have said that stepping on the temple steps where Jesus walked was more thrilling than stepping on the moon. I have heard those who have journeyed to Israel state to me that the Bible literally comes to life for a person after such a journey. You see shepherds on the roadside herding sheep in much the same way their ancestors did 2000 years ago. You walk on pathways and steps that Jesus himself walked on. Sites, smells, a boat ride on the sea of Galilee, readings of scripture stories at probable locations, all bring the Bible to life in indescribable ways for people of faith.

Without it, reading the Bible is like watching a movie where there is no set, no costumes, just actors on an empty stage, sitting on stools and reading a script. But with such a trip, Bible stories spring to life, like watching a large budget Hollywood movie, replete with actors, costumes, and scenery with an authentic appearance. Similarly, the value in identifying Book of Mormon Lands would be in enhancing one’s reading experience and study of the Book of Mormon. This is of secondary importance to the Book of Mormon’s principal purpose, to testify of Jesus Christ. But it can be a valuable and rewarding exercise for those who believe in the book. For those of The Church of Jesus Christ, my aim here is a similar literary journey with the Book of Mormon: to show plausible locations (if not prime candidate locations) for the Book of Mormon, and to paint vistas of ancient landscapes, cultures, and peoples that Book of Mormon groups may have lived among, thus helping the serious student of the Book of Mormon be more able to visualize what it could have been like. My intent is to present the best “candidates” from the archaeological record (described below). I hope this will result in bringing the Book of Mormon to life a little bit more, like a trip to Israel does for the Bible, for the believing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. 

A second reason for writing a book series like this are for those people who are not members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who may have an interest in the Book of Mormon and The Church. This audience could include people of other faiths, beliefs, or persuasions, including those investigating The Church, those curious about the Book of Mormon, and even perhaps academics and scholars, that have some interest in this subject. I often wonder what people in general think of when they hear about the Book of Mormon. Do they immediately write it off as fiction? Likely so for many of them. Innocent as it may be, this is mostly the fault of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We as members of The Restored Church of Jesus Christ don’t have a firm reference point in the Americas for the Book of Mormon. So we have come up with anything and everything as we describe the Book of Mormon to our friends and people we interact with. It seems that, for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Book of Mormon happened where ever someone served as a missionary, or where their sons or daughters served as missionaries. If you talk to former missionaries who served their missions in Peru, they will tell you with conviction, almost testimony like conviction, that the Book of Mormon happened there. The same will be true for many missionaries who served in Brazil, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, or Missouri or Florida for that matter. I served as a missionary in the New England area. By this “rule” I should be firmly entrenched in the idea that the Book of Mormon happened in the Eastern United States. I have even heard a former missionary who served in Alaska wonder if it happened up there.    

The problem for those not of the The Restored Church of Jesus Christ, who talk to members of that church about the Book of Mormon, or who encounter modern cultural productions on the Book of Mormon, is the unbelievability of the book because of how the members of The Church have portrayed it. I do not believe this has been intentional or malicious in any way, but it has had its consequences. I grew up on the artwork of Arnold Friberg, famous Latter Day Saint artist most known outside of Mormon circles for his 15 pre-visualization paintings for Cecille DeMille’s The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and his painting of George Washington kneeling in prayer.

Friberg’s Book of Mormon paintings fascinated me as a child when I was first learning about the Book of Mormon. As a young missionary, I bought Friberg prints of my favorite Book of Mormon stories and hung them on my apartment walls. I still cherish and love these pictures today. But these paintings seem to mostly portray white European Caucasians dressed as Old World type citizens and soldiers of classical civilizations like Greece and Rome, or even red headed[1] or blond haired Scandinavian-looking Vikings, whose men could pass for WWE wrestlers on steroids (to be fair, Friberg did attempt to incorporate some ancient American looks in these paintings, such as jaguar skins, quetzal feathers, and obsidian spiked war clubs common among the ancient cultures of Mexico and Central America). Since Friberg, Book of Mormon stories have been portrayed similarly, or in any number of other ways. My son told me of a film on a Book of Mormon story that he saw in a religion class for high schoolers in 2018. His statement was that it looked to him “like Roman Legionaries chasing around a bunch of Comanches” (as portrayed by Hollywood John Wayne movies). In my opinion, the way various members of the community of The Church of Jesus Christ have portrayed the Book of Mormon has been a large stumbling block to those not of that faith, leading many people to quickly dismiss the Book of Mormon as inauthentic fiction. 

We live in an age of information and unprecedented educational opportunities. Many of those who are not members of The Church of Jesus Christ that are inquiring about it are highly educated and deserve something better than the naive and poor portrayals that our pop culture seems to regularly produce. Such portrayals are quite unbelievable. And we can, and ought to do a better job with the information that is out there. The second reason to write this series is to help those honestly investigating the Book of Mormon overcome the inadvertent and unintentional messages that we have portrayed about the Book of Mormon that make it seem immediately unbelievable, based on current knowledge about the ancient Americas and its peoples, to show what the Book of Mormon requires and does not require (which has also been frequently misinterpreted), and to show that it is not only possible, but indeed plausible that Book of Mormon peoples lived in the ancient Americas. 

This book is not intended to attempt to convince anyone, including academics and archaeologists, that there is undeniable archaeological proof out there for the Book of Mormon. As of yet, there is not any undeniable evidence that would do so. If I were writing to an academic audience, this book would be very different. But such an exercise would likely prove unfruitful anyway for a number of reasons. LDS Archaeologist John E. Clark puts it best in an article published at fairmormon.org. In this article, he states that “(1) archaeological evidence will never prove or disprove the truth or falsity of the Book of Mormon, (2) the amount of physical evidence that potentially corroborates claims in the Book of Mormon has increased as a function of more and better archaeology, and (3) evidence gets interpreted according to one’s prior belief or disbelief in the book.” On locating Book of Mormon lands, I highly recommend anyone interested in this subject to read Dr. Clark’s full article, published in 2011, at the following website address: https://www.fairmormon.org/testimonies/scholars/john-e-clark 

In summary, this book series is intended to enrich the study of the Book of Mormon for members of The Church in a visual way, in the same way that a tour to Israel does for students of the bible. Second, this book series is intended for those that are not members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who have interest in the Book of Mormon, to show them the very real possibility that the Book of Mormon could be what it claims to be. But after that, the next step, and the only sure way to know of the truthfulness of the Book is to read it, ponder it, and pray to know of its truthfulness. Even if the Book of Mormon were proven to be a true record of ancient peoples who lived in the Americas, it is the power of Christ in the words of the book that will truly affect one’s life.  

 [1] Red hair is a cultural marker of the Norse and Vikings, and occurs practically anywhere that Viking trade routes were found, not something that would be associated in any obvious way with The Book of Mormon.

How would you like to find the ruins of an ancient lost city? This happened to me for the first time when I was just 25 years old, deep in the jungles of Central America. In December of 1996, I and another student had finished our finals at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and began a two day drive down through Texas to Southern Mexico. Our mission was a reconnaissance trip to the ancient Maya ruins of Piedras Negras in Guatemala, in preparation for an archaeological project that was to begin there in April of 1997, under the direction of Dr. Stephen Houston of Brigham Young University, and Lic. Hector Escobedo of the University del Valle de Guatemala.

We took turns driving for 48 straight hours, reaching the edge of the Maya world. I knew that we were entering more remote lands when I began seeing the typical cinder block homes of Mexico give way to one room homes made of wood with thatched roofs, often just a few feet from the roadside.

The lost city of Piedras Negras is only reachable by walking seldom trod trails through the tropical rain forest or by a lengthy river boat journey into that same dense jungle on the remote Usumacinta River, which forms the border between remote Mexico and Guatemala. The University of Pennsylvania had worked at these ruins in the 1930s, producing reports and a map of the site core. But no villages exist in that region, and no roads lead there. The only inhabitants are a troop of Howler Monkeys, the occasional jaguar, a herd of wild peccaries, and other creatures of the jungle.  

We drove as close as was possible and arrived at the remote jungle frontier town of Corregidora Ortiz, Tabasco Mexico. Here we found a guide named Pablo, who purportedly knew the pathways into the jungle and to the ruins, which was said to be a long day’s walk. It is critical to have a local jungle guide on such expeditions. You can take 10 steps in the jungle and immediately get turned around, not knowing north from south, east from west, or where the trail is, which often gets covered with leaves. Pablo seemed to know the forest as if it was his home, having grown up there. I can hardly describe my excitement as we began our journey. The thought of visiting such ancient ruins that very few people have ever seen, since the city was abandoned over 1200 years ago, filled me with anticipation.

We set off as early as possible in the morning, taking with us a mule named Macho, and what I thought was sufficient water. It was surreal as we entered the jungle, like entering an entirely different world. As we hiked, I noted at first some space high up between the treetops where you could see blue patches of sky. But after not much time, the forest canopy completely sealed together, blocking out all direct sunlight. The trees were immense, some of them stretching up between 100-200 feet high. Large keel-like fins came out of the bases of trees like the Kapok tree, stabilizing and anchoring them to the forest floor, reminding me of the fins at the base of large rockets. And out of these wood buttress fins came the roots, snaking out further along the ground. The trail weaves around and through these giants, and you have to keep your eyes on the ground, or trip over the crawling roots. The roots are shaped like a vacuum hose at your local car wash. The larger ones grow up to a foot or more in diameter, about size of commercial duct-tube that you see in the ceilings of industrial buildings. Other trees also posed some threats. Some of them where much shorter, with skinny trunks as thick as your arm, but covered every inch in thousands of protruding needles, each a couple of inches long. Then there is the Chichen Negro tree (black poisonwood), whose milk from its leaves can temporarily burn and blind you, (I’ve heard the very air around them can sting, even without touch). In spite of these minor dangers, the jungle was absolutely beautiful. We were in a wonderland.

I was surprised that we didn’t see many animals in the jungle. They are elusive. We would frequently hear the noise of birds and insects, but did not see much sign of them, until I saw a strange creature. It was the Great Curassow. This bird stands three feet tall. As I saw it running here and there with its fanning crown, long legs, and quick pace, it seemed as if I were on another planet, or back in the times of velociraptors. The males are black or a striking blue, and dart through the jungle and jump through the trees. 

But if there were another word to describe the morning, it would be hot. Oppressively hot, and humid. For the first hours of hiking, the trail was  at least a meter wide, and clear, with obvious frequent usage. Smaller trails forked off the main trail here and there. But after some time, our path became less perceptible. We were entirely at the mercy of our guide Pablo, who appeared to be a young man in his 20’s. He seemed confident in the way, and so we followed. As the day progressed, sweat poured out of my body and soaked my shirt. My first apprehension of danger came as I realized we were quickly burning through our large bottles of water. Yet being a former college athlete, I knew the importance of staying hydrated. I drank sufficient to keep up with the water loss, hoping for relief at the ruins, which I knew stood overlooking a large river. But the river was nowhere in site. No sound of its waters penetrated our ears. Only stillness, occasionally disturbed by small sounds here and there in the jungle. Soon we ran out of water, and I expressed my concern to our guide that we needed to find water, and find it fast. These people living on the edges of the jungles, those who spend their time in the jungles, have an amazing local knowledge. Pablo found a vine and chopped it in half with his machete. He said “Ojo de Agua” and began squeezing it. Water dripped out of it and I quenched my thirst from the “Eye of Water” vine. It was this vine that sustained us from time to time as we continued. Another surprise was some sugar cane that had been planted by someone in the past, that still grew on its own in small patches. We chewed and sucked sweet liquid out of the cane and had our gatorade boost de la selva (of the jungle). 

Mid day passed and no ruins. Not a sign of them. I don’t remember if I wore a watch, but you could tell as the day waxed on, not from the direct view of the sun, but from the direction of the diffused light that came through the forest canopy. At some point in the afternoon, I noticed my strength slowly diminishing. My friend was able to take some rest breaks by riding our mule Macho. Unfortunately, I carried a bit of extra weight, coming in around 260 lbs. Macho was not “macho” enough to carry me.  

Our excitement had slowly drained off, replaced by heat, monotony, and endless walking. I was beginning to wonder if ruins in the jungle were a myth, a fable of someone’s imagination. There were no signs here, along any part of this trail (at least not ones that I could recognize with my level of experience at that time). Walking, walking, walking, the doldrums set in. Late in the afternoon my dulled wits were snapped back into full attention as we came across the fresh paw print of a jaguar in the trail. The thought of running into this apex predator began pumping adrenaline. Added to this, not too much later in the trail, I saw the print of a combat boot in some mud. This was a bit alarming. We had heard that some communist guerillas, left over from the Guatemalan Civil War, had made their camp somewhere in this region of the jungle. Now my alertness was up. 

But then I saw my first hints of what I was really there for. A small stone wall, of ancient manufacture. The corner of a low building? I wasn’t sure. But there it was, stacked at least three stones high, with well made, shaped, rectangular stone blocks. This excitement made me immediately forget the jaguar and boot prints in the trail. I asked our guide if we were there, and he said no, but that the ruins were very close, just around the corner. 

Continuing on, we crossed some rolling hills under the jungle. The diffused light started to become even more gray, so I knew it was late in the day, at dusk time. Bats began swooping under the forest canopy, down closer to the ground, hunting insects. At length I asked our guide Pablo how close we were to the ancient city. His response was “not far, it’s just around the corner”. But it wasn’t. Every time I asked, his response was the same: “we are close, we are practically there, it’s just around the corner”. We continued for an hour (what seemed like three), and darkness set in. At this point I was dehydrated, and utterly exhausted. Thick blackness enveloped the jungle as nightfall hit. Our guide had become more excited, stating to us that we were nearly there, but that he needed to bed down our mule Macho. He found some banana trees that must have been planted within the last century, perhaps by the old archaeologists back in the 1930s, or lumber crews. I wanted to bed down with Macho, but my friend and our guide urged me on. Reluctantly, I followed.

We began ascending a trail up a ridge by the light of our “torches” (flashlights). With my strength fully sapped, I really struggled with the climb. I remember seeing a small cliff overhang filled with rocks and leaves in the bottom, and asking our guide if we could camp there. My friend said “no way”. It was totally unsuitable, and probably filled with scorpions, spiders, or who knows what else, but my judgement was failing with my strength. We finally reached the top and the ground leveled out, curiously flat. It was flatter than any spot of the jungle we had hiked through. A few feet further along this perfectly level ground, we encountered an old rusted out tractor (I later found out it was left by the 1930s archaeology team).

Our guide’s excitement was very high. He kept saying we are there, it’s just over there, it’s “just around the corner”. I had heard that before, and I had had enough. I took off my backpack, set it on the ground, and refused to move another inch. Our guide seemed to dance around me, stating that if I just walked a bit further . . . My friend also gently tried to convince me to continue. But I knew I was done. Without speaking, I opened my pack, pulled out our tent, and began setting it up. Finished, I looked up, and noticed two things. The tight forest canopy, which was so successful at blocking out blue sky and sunlight, also completely blocked out all star light. When our flashlights were off, it was pitch black. You could hold up your hand a few inches in front of your face, and not see a finger, or shape, only thick darkness, oppressive like the heat of the jungle. The second thing I noticed was the noise. The jungle, which was much quieter during the day, utterly came alive at night. The insect noise made it sound like we were back in time at a World War II airfield, with the hums of dozens of fighters and bombers flying over head. 

Finishing setting up my tent, I climbed inside. I vaguely remember my friend forcing me to eat a military spaghetti MRE meal. By the torch light of my friend’s flashlight, my vision faded to blackness, like the night forest blackness outside, and I simply succumbed to the exhaustion of the day and collapsed on the floor of my tent. I may have got my boots off, but my sleeping bag never left my pack.

In the morning I awoke, a bit stiff and sore, but refreshed. I emerged from my tent to see the familiar jungle forest, but again, curiously, every direction I looked, the floor of the forest was perfectly flat. No terrain. Too eager for breakfast, we immediately began to explore. I headed to the left of my tent and not far away, I found myself standing between two jumbled walls built of cut stone, like the low wall I had seen the day before, but only much taller, over the height of my head. Continuing on I saw the first terrain on the edge of the flat floor of the jungle, a small hill. Approaching the hill, to my astonishment, I saw something like this peering out of the jungle leaves: 

Then turning around, at the base of the hill I saw this:

What on earth was it? A stone ramp, a bridge? I could see moss covered hieroglyphs on the side. This was in fact a stone monument called a stela that had fallen over. It used to stand tall and erect, planted in the ground like a jungle tree. It had the faded image of a king carved on the front, with hieroglyphs, somehow relating to him. Approaching for a closer examination, I looked behind this stone monument and saw a stone staircase and realized this was no hill. It was a small pyramid, completely devoured by the forest, covered in jungle. The stone face I saw staring at me out of the jungle was one of several stucco masks that flanked the staircase.

I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. I began running around, looking everywhere, wondering what I might find. We went back past the tent in the other direction, where our guide had urged me to go the night before (the real and actual “just around the corner” spot). To my right rose up what seemed like a much larger hill. As I came round its base, I saw massive stone walls, and atop them on platform covered in jungle, a row of more than a half dozen broken stela bases.  

The megalithic stone walls flanked giant stairs ascending the “mountain”. And we began to climb. Atop the first large staircase we encountered well made walls of stone, covered in plaster, archways over ancient doors, rooms everywhere, with roofs collapsed in. These ascended up and up and up this man-made mountain, more buildings with rooms, more archways. We climbed to the top, and peering off the backside, there I could see it for the first time, way down below, the great river, the Usumacinta, “Monkey River”, the Nile of the Maya.

What I had been climbing through were the palaces of Piedras Negras at the “Great Acropolis”, called by our professor the “Versaille of the Maya”. What looked like a small mountain was really tiers and tiers of palaces and templed pyramids climbing up and up to the highest height of the place. I had been climbing up through levels of palace room after palace room, with stunning Maya archways and walls, some collapsed, some still in tact, but covered in the immense jungle.

The jungle floor that my tent sat on, that was so curiously flat, was an ancient plaza, paved with a cement floor, now covered in leaves and inches of humus.

We returned in April of 1997 with Brigham Young University’s Piedras Negras Project. I was the project mapper for that first season, and had many an adventure, including the discovery of several ruined sectors of this ancient city that were previously unknown (detailed in volume 2 of this series). 

Sitting amongst these ruins and pondering, of course like anyone would, I wondered, “who were these people? What were they like? What did they look like? What happened to their civilization?”. I was an archaeology student, with plans to head to graduate school and to get a Ph.D. But I was also an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Members of The Church have a belief, a conviction, in the Book of Mormon. This book claims to be a record of four rather large ancient American groups, or cultures, and even more smaller groups, that reached “civilization” level by more than 2000 years ago. They had cities of cement with palaces, governors, kings, armies, and vast populations. The Book of Mormon records that although these peoples were surrounded by some form of an ancient American pagan religion, rich with a pantheon of gods, many of the peoples of the Book of Mormon believed in and worshiped Jesus Christ, that same Jesus Christ mentioned in the New Testament of the Bible, and Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament of the Bible. In fact, members of The Church go further than conviction or belief in the Book of Mormon. We have what we call “testimony” of the book. That is, we believe that the Holy Spirit of God has testified to our very minds and souls, that this book is true, in like manner to the Bible, that these people existed, that the Book of Mormon is not fiction, and that Jesus Christ himself appeared to a group of these people shortly after his resurrection around 34 A.D. 

Piedras Negras had a rich and long history, spanning over a thousand years. Most of the buildings I encountered were constructed many centuries after the end of the Book of Mormon. But investigations have found earlier buildings, buried beneath the later pyramids, that date to Book of Mormon times. Could any of the peoples who had lived there had anything to do with the Book of Mormon? I couldn’t help but wonder. At the time it wasn’t my intent to pursue that thought. I was a regular archaeology student, like any other, planning on a secular career in Maya studies, working with one of the world’s great Maya scholars, who was not a member of my church. I didn’t have any religious agenda at the time. It was my plan to go on to pursue a Ph.D at Yale with the help of my professor, but I made some mistakes of naivete and the immaturity of youth and another won that prize. My dreams of a career in archaeology did not work out for me. But eventually it did lead me back to that thought I had in the jungle that day, sitting amongst the palaces of the ancients. Could these peoples or their ancestors have had anything to do with the rich stories of the Book of Mormon? Those thoughts have lead to this book series. I hope you will enjoy discovering what I have found.