The Power of Context:
BMAF 2004 Fall Conference
The Power of Context:
Why Book of Mormon Geography Matters
by Brant Gardner
Brant Gardner considers himself “a slightly used anthropologist.” While he has never made a living with his degree in anthropology, it nevertheless seems to define his personal perspective. He pursues research when he can and works the rest of the time. He has a degree in university studies from Brigham Young University and a master’s in anthropology from State University of New York in Albany. Brant also completed the course work for a Ph.D. in anthropology. He is married and has four children.
It is entirely possible to read the Bible in English as we do, and never know anything about the history of Israel, and still learn important principles. It is much easier to learn certain kinds of things and certain perspectives if we understand the culture that it came from and some of the references that
they are making. If we understand those things, we can enrich our experience with the Bible. We would like to be able to have that same type of enriching experience with the Book of Mormon. What I hope we can do, at least while we are going through things tonight, is get to the point that we find out why
it is that thinking and meditating on Book of Mormon geography might have a chance to teach us something that we need to know from the Book of Mormon itself.
We have talked a lot about general locations for the Book of Mormon itself. This is the basic map that I am going to be using [displays a map of Mesoamerica on the overhead], not because it is the right one, not because it is the only one, but because it isthe map that I have a copy of. But the basic idea is that this cultural area of the world,is the place where we are finding most of the information that seems to fit with the Book of Mormon.
Book of Mormon Mesoamerican Relationships
Jaredites Olmec
Mulekites Zoque
Nephites Maya
These are not equivalents. The Jaredites were not the Olmec, and the Maya were not the Nephites. However, these are cultures that dominated the times and places of the Book of Mormon.
The Book of Mormon peoples participated in Mesoamerican culture. The Book of Mormon requires that we have certain types of things happening. The Book of Mormon requires that we have at
east three different cultural peoples who live around slightly different times and in slightly different locations, and we need to know something about them. If we don’t have people who correspond with these peoples and their locations, then we’re not in the right spot. So if we find a perfect match for
everything else in the geography of the Book of Mormon, but then find that no one was living there until 1000 A.D., then we’re in the wrong spot. We must find real people who happened to live in the place where the Book of Mormon was; otherwise, we are not in the right place.
It just so happens that in this area of Mesoamerica, we happen to have a cultural match of time and locations with peoples in the Book of Mormon. I have put these peoples on the right. The Jaredites and the Olmecs were around at the same time. The Mulekites and the Zoque were around at the same time. The reason why I identify the Zoqueans with the Mulekites is because of a language, cultural issue that we will talk about in just a minute. And the Nephites are down in the area where the Maya lived. Now, one of the things that I want to make sure everyone understands is that, again, one of the mistakes that we make as Latter-day Saints, when we try to mesh things with culture in the real world, is that it’s so easy to say that the Mulekites were the Maya. That is the wrong thing to say because there were all kinds of Maya who were around before the Nephites ever showed up. They may have never done high-culture Maya things because there were people speaking a Maya language before the Nephites ever showed up. So, to say that they are exactly the same would presume that they began and just showed up on the scene when the Nephites arrived, and we know that that is not correct. We have historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence that says that would not be correct. However, it is possible to say
that the Nephites participated in the culture of the Maya. In other words, when we look for cultural data, we might expect that the kinds of pots that they cooked in might have been the same kinds of pots that the Maya cooked in, that the fabric of their clothing and loincloths was probably the same kind of thing, and probably the same kinds of designs as those that may have been in the Maya culture. The reason to make that distinction is that there were always sub-groups in a population.
For example, how many people here
drove to come to this conference -- you got
into a car and drove? How many people here
are LDS? How many people drove in a
uniquely LDS car? [Laughter from the crowd]
Minivans. If our homes were buried and dug
up a few thousand years later, how would you
know an LDS home from a neighbor? I live in
New Mexico, so I have a few non-LDS
neighbors. How would you tell the difference?
If you dug up my house you would see that I
used the same pots as my neighbor does. My
car looks like one that my neighbor has. And,
in fact, both I and my neighbor seem to have a
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shrine to a particular box that sits on the wall
and has a glass screen. Most homes seem to
have those shrines these days. We seem to
worship a particular box. If we were
archaeologists in the future, we might think
such a thing. But the point is, what is
happening in the Book of Mormon area -- and
we are talking about Mesoamerica -- is that we
must expect that the people who were
Nephites would move into that area, and if
they don’t know where the clay is to make
their pots, they are going to ask someone who
is there, and they would ask, “What is the best
shape to use, etc., and they end up using the
material of the culture that is there.
Archaeologists have a hard time dating the reentrance
of the Egyptianized Hebrews into
Canaan. Apparently, when they moved in,
they used Canaanite pots, and if you don’t
have a difference in pots, we can’t tell who
you are. It doesn’t mean they weren’t there.
It just means that they used the material of
culture. So when we say that the Nephites
participated in the culture, we can identify a
cultural set of information that would identify
Nephite culture without saying that they were
exactly the same.
Next question, if we have a geography of
the Book of Mormon, how do we know that we
have found the right one? We’ve got all these
requirements of ups and downs and climate,
and typography and hydrology, and there are
all kinds of reasons why the geography is
going to have to work. After we have found
the geography, we have some basic
requirements. We darn well better have
people living there at the time when the Book
of Mormon said they were there. One of the
things that we really ought to do, for instance,
is make sure that the area that we are talking
about wasn’t under water. If we discover that
the land was under water at a certain time,
and we propose that people were supposed to
be living there, then it is not the land of the
Book of Mormon. So there are all kinds of
basic things, but once you get those basics
down, how do you move past that and
discover whether you are in the right place at
the right time?
One of the things that I have found that
is particularly useful is a test that I call
productivity.
The Test of Productivity. If we have found the
right geographic area for the Book of Mormon, it
should begin to teach us more about the book than we
could learn without it. If the geography is productive,
that is, it explains features of the text that otherwise
are difficult to understand – we are in the right place!
In other words, does knowing the cultural
background of Mesoamerica teach us
anything about the Book of Mormon that we
couldn’t see unless we knew that cultural
background?
Now, you have to remember how people
write texts. When people write a text, and they
are going to write a history, they tend to write
the unusual things and not the things that
they assume the reader would know. For
instance, if I said, “How many of you drove
here?” most of you would say yes. Most of us
would assume that each of us came in a
vehicle. It would not be something that we
would feel compelled to write down as, “By the
way, the automobile that we drove in actually
had four wheels.” That is not a piece of
information that is really of interest to us
because we know that is kind of normal. We
might mention, “One of us came in a
motorcycle that had three wheels,” because
that would be unusual and not to be expected.
What happens in cultural situations is that
when cultural things dictate the events of the
text, and it is a different culture and one that
we don’t understand, then we are going to
have problems with the text. We want to
spend some time trying to see whether this
area is productive in telling us more about the
Book of Mormon.
Quick test: how many of you have not
seen this before? [Displays a black and white
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drawing on the screen] Those of you who
have seen this, what are you looking at? OK,
you can see the dog? When you first look at
that, your very first impression is, “I have no
idea what I am looking at.” After a while, it
comes into focus and you see the Dalmatian.
For those of you who could not see the dog
before, can you now see the dog? Is there
anyone here who still cannot see the dog? I
promise you that if you see the dog once, you
can close your eyes, come back to this at any
time, and still see that dog. It will never
disappear again. The reason is that we
understand patterns. Once we have seen a
pattern, we lock it into our brain and we can
see it. That is what productivity does in the
Book of Mormon. It says that there is a
pattern of information. If I know the clue and
can see it, then other things should become
obvious. It may not be obvious at first, but if
we know the patterns, then all of a sudden it
clicks into place.
Now, geography, not because of
geography itself, but because of the cultural
area that the geography entails, is going to be
the pattern that we are going to push under
the Book of Mormon and say, “Does the Book
of Mormon picture make sense based on what
we know about the culture of that area?” Why
does geography matter? Why did the
Mulekites speak a different language?
Back to the map. A couple of things are
happening. The City of Nephi was down
somewhere in this area [points at map].
Remember that I said that the Nephites
participated in the Maya culture? That area of
the world is linguistically, archaeologically, and
culturally Maya. Several of the Maya
languages are being spoken down in that
particular region. Up in this particular region
[points at another spot on map], there are
different languages being spoken. That more
northern area is where the Olmec were and
the area where we would say that the
Jaredites were, not necessarily the same cities
or the same people, but certainly the same
area and participating in the same things. If
you have Mulekites that are coming into the
area, they come up that river valley to get to
Zarahemla. The cultural area that they have
to go through to get there is a Jaredite area,
translating that into Book of Mormon terms. It
is an Olmec area, translating that into
linguistic terms. The language of Olmec is
Mixte-Zoque – that is actually two different
languages, Mixte and Zoque. When they got
back that far, they both merged and invented
a new name, a hyphenated name -- this
modern marriage that we have going on here.
One of the two language groups here is Zoque.
The Zoquean group broke off from this area
and moved up the Grijalva river valley. That is
one of the languages being spoken during
Book of Mormon times up here in that area.
Regardless of what language the Nephites are
speaking, they are moving from either
speaking Hebrew and, I suspect, a Mayan
language at this point in time. Moving up into
that area, you have a clash of two different
languages that are meeting in Zarahemla, and
you know that from the history.
Why Does Geography Matter?
Why did the Mulekites have a different language
than the Nephites?
Why did the expedition that Limhi sent
miss Zarahemla?
This is just sort of a geographical
conundrum here. Larry Poulson is an amateur
geographer working on these things. I was
talking to him last week, and he mentioned
this to me, so I am going to pass it on as
Larry’s information, but it is kind of interesting
because it asks a question. The people in
Limhi’s city are now the people of Nephi-Lehi.
The people of Zeniff came up, then Noah, and
his son Limhi was after him. The people are
tired of the Lamanites beating up on them.
They want to get out, and they want the
people of Zarahemla to fight their battles for
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them, liberate them, and take them away. So
they basically send an expedition off to find
Zarahemla and ask for their help, and they
miss it and get lost. They end up in Jaredite
country. Then they come back, having picked
up information from the Jaredites, including
the stones and other artifacts. The question
is, how did they get lost? If it was really only a
generation or so since they broke off,
someone certainly would have said, “I
remember when we got here” or “My
grandfather told stories about when we got
here.” If you remember looking at that map,
one of the things that they would have passed
through is that river valley. One of the things
they surely would have been saying is, “We
followed the river up to the headwaters, and
then we came down.” So how did they miss
it?
Here is another item to consider
following the same basic idea. [Refers to the
map again] This whole area up here is
Jaredite land. Interestingly enough, the river
here comes down this way and empties into
the Jaredite lands. The source of this other
river is near the source of the first, but it flows
down a different valley. How did they miss?
They had the right information about how to
get to Zarahemla. “Well, you go up into these
mountains, you find the headwaters of this
river, and you follow it.” But they followed the
wrong river. They ended up, however, in
Jaredite country, and that is exactly where the
other river goes. However, we also need to
have Mulekites who are coming from Jaredite
country to Zarahemla. It just so happens that
both of these rivers are dumping into that
same general area but coming down different
valleys. When you put it on a map, all the
sudden, this story starts to make some sense.
We have the occasion when, if I
remember right, Captain Moroni is fighting
some battles with the Lamanites up in this
area, and he has to get back up into Manti.
He leaves after the Lamanite armies, but he
still beats them there. How in the world could
he leave later and show up at Manti before
them? They don’t have a faster army. They
don’t have faster horses. They have the same
mode of locomotion. How did they get there
faster? [Points out both captains’ paths on
the map] Well, the Lamanites had to come
across these mountains and come along here
and go back through this canyon, and Moroni
went straight along this passage. The laws of
physics are that it is faster to go in a straight
line. Knowing something about the geography
is going to tell us something about these
stories in the Book of Mormon.
Now, we want to look at one that is a
little more interesting. This is one for which I
am going to apologize in the beginning,
because in order to make sense out of this, I
am going to make the story sound really bad.
For all of you who love the story of the Anti-
Nephi-Lehies, I am going to mess it up really
bad for you. Trust me, I am going to
straighten it out for you in the end, but you
have to understand that from an historical
standpoint, from the perspective of an
historian looking at the text of the Book of
Mormon, reading the story of the Anti-Nephi-
Lehies -- that story is weird. That story does
not make sense. Let me tell you why.
The beginning of the story is OK. We
don’t have any real problems. We have the
king of the Lamanites who converts to the
gospel, changes his name to Anti-Nephi-Lehi,
and all the believers change their name to
Anti-Nephi-Lehi. So far, we are doing well. In
part of the covenant that they make, they bury
their weapons in the ground. That may not be
too weird. I have seen people who have
suggested that this is like burying the
tomahawk, but they didn’t bury the tomahawk;
they buried the entire arsenal. This was not a
symbolic effort, saying “I will bury one weapon
as a symbol of putting them all down.” It is,
“I’m taking every weapon that we’ve got and
burying them in the earth.” Now, one of the
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things that you might say about this is that
even if they buried them in the earth, they did
it so that they couldn’t get to them as easily.
That is possibly true, except that they probably
knew where they buried them. I would
suggest that if you and I buried a million
dollars worth of gold, we might remember
where we buried it, if we ever thought we
needed it.
So they buried their weapons. Not too
weird, but we’re on our way. Now is when it
gets really strange. Why did they bury their
weapons? In Alma 24:11-12, it says:
“And now behold, my brethren, since it
has been all that we could do, (as we were the
most lost of all mankind) to repent of all our
sins and the many murders which we have
committed, and to get God to take them away
from our hearts, for it was all we could do to
repent sufficiently before God that he would
take away our stain –
“Now, my best beloved brethren, since
God hath taken away our stains, and our
swords have become bright, then let us stain
our swords no more with the blood of our
brethren” [comments and emphasis added].
OK, these are Lamanites who say they
have been killing their brethren -- and you
have men, women, and children making this
oath because they are murderers? Now, think
about that. Let’s say they were all warriors. I
do not know of any culture in the world that
defines a death during wartime as a murder.
Murder happens at some other time and it
isn’t sanctioned. It is extremely rare that you
are going to have women participating in
these military structures. Even if we are
looking at Mesoamerica, we don’t have
women warriors depicted anywhere that I
know of, and yet these women are apparently
saying that they are murders, and apparently
their children are murderers. Sufficiently so,
they say that it was extremely difficult for them
to repent; therefore they made this covenant.
Strange.
How is it that every man converted
had “murdered”?
When had the women “murdered”?
When had their children “murdered”?
Later, when these people are among the
Nephites, they will not break their oath, but
allow their young children – the stripling
warriors – to fight.
Why was it bad for their parents to fight
but good for their young men to fight?
Now, here is the really weird part. These
parents think it is absolutely terrible for them
to break their oath and fight. They buried their
weapons, but when the time came when the
Lamanites were invading, and now they were
in Jershon and they needed some protection,
the Nephites said, “Don’t you dare break that
oath because you will be breaking an oath to
God, and don’t you dare fight.” Someone
came up with a great idea. “I’ve got an idea!
Let’s take our 12- and 14-year-old sons and
let them kill people.” This is a weird story.
“Why is it that it would not be OK for me to
participate in war, but for my 12-year-old,
that’s OK; I don’t mind sending him out with a
sword that is probably a little too big for him,
and a shield that is probably too big.” Can you
imagine 12- and 14-year-olds going to battle?
The next time you are in Sacrament Meeting,
take a look at the young men who are passing
the Sacrament, and think of them as Stripling
Warriors.
I took a look at the dates of the times
between these two events, and it does seem
that the children who were born after the
covenant was made are going to be
somewhere in the range of 12 and 14 years
old. We are talking about 12- to 14-year-old
boys that are being sent out to war. Not 16- to
18- year-old boys. They were probably already
in the army -- 12 to 14.
Now, next really weird thing. The
Lamanites attacked. They did some really
strange stuff. They get tired of killing the AntiBMAF
2004 Fall Conference 49
Nephi-Lehies, who are not fighting back, and
they say, “You know, this just isn’t any fun
anymore. You’re not fighting back, and I’m
just getting a little tired of this, so I stop.” And
yet, the text says, that they were still so full of
blood lust that they really wanted to kill
somebody else, so they decided to go to
Ammonihah and kill them.
“And behold, it came to pass that those
Lamanites were more angry because they had
slain their brethren; therefore they swore
vengeance upon the Nephites; and they did no
more attempt to slay the people of Anti-Nephi-
Lehi at that time. But they took their armies
and went over into the borders of the land of
Zarahemla, and fell upon the people who were
in the land of Ammonihah and destroyed
them” (Alma 25:1-2).
Think about this: they are in the heat of
the moment and are getting tired enough that
they are not wanting to kill anybody, and now
they decide that they want to kill someone
else, so they go down to Ammonihah. Well,
let’s go back to geography. If you are going
back to geography, they are leaving
somewhere around here and heading up on a
long coastal march. Now, remember that
we’ve heard that going from the Land of Nephi
to there is a distance of 12-13 days? And they
seem to be going a little bit longer? These
guys are so full of blood lust that they are
going to spend 20 days marching so that they
can go attack somebody and kill them? Well,
isn’t there anybody closer?
This is a weird story. It is either an
absolute re-creation of a cultural event, where
we don’t know enough information to be able
to interpret it, or Joseph Smith was a lousy
story teller. Obviously, I prefer the first.
The last point on Ammonihah: When the
Lamanites attack Ammonihah, they do
something different. Most of the time when
Lamanites attack a city -- what they really want
to do is set up a tribute relationship with
them. They do a very Mesoamerican-type
economy down there, and they don’t
necessarily come in and conquer. They come
in and say, “OK, you guys can stay where you
are, just pay me a tribute.” In Ammonihah,
they go in and wipe out the city, which really
kind of destroys its economic value, and then
it specifically mentions that they take captives
back. It is rare that you get any indication of
captives in Lamanite action. There are some
indications, and I think I found one when I was
looking through, but it is really rare to have
any kind of emphasis on captives, and yet,
that’s what they take at Ammonihah.
The Mesoamerican Cult of War
War to obtain captives
Human sacrifice
Accession of the king linked to captives in battle
and their sacrifice.
OK. Now we are going to solve the riddle,
and we are going to use some cultural
information to do it. I don’t know if this is a
term that anyone else is using, but it works as
a description. We are talking about religious
ideas in Mesoamerica. One of them that is
really important in understanding, either the
Maya or later in the Mixtec and Aztec worlds,
is this concept of the cult of war. War was a
sacred act, and what you did in war was you
captured people and you brought them back,
and you sacrificed them. It is absolutely
intertwined with the cult of human sacrifice.
When you brought captives back, you were not
very nice to them. The Maya were in many
ways particularly nasty. In one account they
would truss them up as a ball and bounce
them down the steps of the temple to see how
high they would bounce. In the murals of
Bonampak, after they cleaned them all up,
they found that the people who were
entreating put out their fingers. The people
had blood dripping from their fingers most
likely because they had had their fingernails
pulled out. The Maya were not necessarily
nice people, certainly not the peaceful
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stargazers that J.R. Thompson thought they
were. But the most important thing, for our
discussion, is that when you seated a new
king, these aspects of the cult of war came
into play, and one of the requirements for
seating a new king, as far as it can be
reconstructed from the iconography, is that
you should sacrifice a captive, particularly a
captive that you captured in war.
It is going to be kind of hard to see this
particular illustration. [Displays an ancient
diagram on the screen with a king in the
middle] I am not an artist. I pulled out one
from the books, and you are not going to see it
too well. One of the things that Brother
Christensen said was that they kind of look
like spaghetti. It takes a while before you can
look at Maya art and say, “I know exactly what
that is.”
What you have here is a king, sitting at
the top, but you also have, down at the
bottom, somebody who is pretty dead. That is
a sacrificed captive down there who has his
heart cut out. This is a scaffolding, and
walking up the scaffolding are bloody
footprints of the captive. This is a scene of
the ascension of a king. This is someone who
is being made a king. Here is our text:
“At Piedras Negras, each Late Classic
ruler recorded the important events of his
reign on the monument series that begins with
a depiction of the king mounting a scaffold to
assume the throne. . . . There, the new king is
stepping from a palanquin in which he has
been carried to the place of sacrifice. A victim
. . . is tied to a scaffold. On Piedras Negras
Stella 11, the victim, who has already been
killed by heart excision, lies dead stretched
across an altar on the ground below the
scaffolding” (Linda Schele and Mary Ellen
Miller, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual
in Maya Art [New York: George Braziller, Inc.,
1986], 111).
The king, bloody-footed from the sacrifice
of the victim, has climbed to the niche and
leaves his tracks on a narrow cloth that covers
the ladder. He sits comfortably on a pillow
inside the niche that had recently held the
struggling victim. Graphic, nasty stuff.
[Displays other artifacts that portray
kings and their victims.] There is the captive
that the king is standing on. There is the king,
and there is the captive. It appears that one
of the things that happens in the cult of war is
that in order to see the king, you need to
capture someone in battle and sacrifice them.
That is your background.
With that background, and just as we
have seen the dog in that picture, we can see
how to take our perspective and put it
underneath the events of the Book of Mormon
to see if it can make some sense to us.
Why murders? All of the people who
were converted to the Anti-Nephi-Lehies were
Lamanites. They were all people who believed
in whatever the religion was that they had.
They were converts. They used to do
something else. It appears that what they
used to do was believe in the cult of war and
believe in the sacrifice. Anytime that they
were participating in the cult of war, just like
an alcoholic returning to the drink might do, it
brought up all of the feelings that they might
have had or were associated with their old
religion, and those were things that were very
difficult for them to get rid of, and they did not
want to revisit those. As part of their
repentance process, they completely
disassociated themselves with anything that
was associated with that religion.
How is it that the women were
murderers? It is because they were
complacent in the human sacrifice? How is it
that the children were involved? They also
were brought up believing that. Why did they
bury their weapons? In Mesoamerica, one of
the ways to make an offering to God is to bury
things. It is fairly well known. They call them
a cache. In front of many of the stone stiles
that they have in the courtyards, there will be
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a place that is dug out where they can bury
things to offer them up to the Gods. If you are
a Mesoamerican, then you are going to offer
up things to God, and of course, you are going
to bury them. That is exactly what a good
Mesoamerican would do.
Why Ammonihah? Because it was an
easy target. They weren’t expecting it. They
didn’t know they were coming. Why did they
have to go there? Well, the Lamanites were
going in to overthrow Anti-Nephi-Lehi as the
king. This is exactly the situation that we see
in Mesoamerica when you have a new king
taking place. The whole idea of the Lamanites
was to get rid of Anti-Nephi-Lehi and install a
new king, which means that as soon as they
succeeded, the first thing they needed to do
was to make a new king because they had just
kicked the other one out. If you want to make
a new king, what do you need? You need
captives that were captured in battle.
What about all those Anti-Nephi-Lehies
that were slaughtered? They didn’t fight back.
They didn’t count. They were not captured in
battle. You have to have some, and they
didn’t have any, and they needed some pretty
quick. They went to a place where they
thought they could get a quick victory because
they didn’t know they were coming, and so
they took a nice long march to a city that
wasn’t one of the fortified cities of the
Nephites.
Why Ammonihah?
Like many a Maya ruler, Bird Jaguar’s mystique was
closely bound to his image as an indomitable warrior.
His favorite military titles, “He of 20 Captives” and
“Master of Aj Uk”, were seldom absent from his name
phrase and much space was devoted to his various
campaigns. Yet, modern understanding of these texts
shows just how lowly most of these victims were. He
made immense capital out of minor successes (Martin
and Marshall Orube.
--Chronicide of the Maya Krugi and Quimeri.
[London: Tharnes and Hudson 2000]. 130.
Why Ammonihah? They thought it was
going to be an easy mark. Why are you going
to march all that way? Because you think it is
going to be easy. You are going to get what
you want and come back, and it is going to be
fairly simple.
Why could the Stripling Warriors fight
when their parents couldn’t? Because they
were never part of that culture. That was
never part of their religion. They could pick up
arms, and it would not bring back any thought
of an old religion, any thoughts of something
that their parents had tried so hard to get
away from. So when they fought, they could
fight the way that the Nephites did, for their
lives and for their people, their liberty. They
could fight for the right reasons, and they
would not have to fight for the old reasons or
worry about what those reasons might have
been.
What happens when we do geography?
It tells us about real people and real places.
I was going to tell another story, but in
the interest of time, what you will get is me
telling you that the Book of Mormon is a
remarkable document that looks better when
you read it against a Mesoamerican context,
than it does even when you don’t. It is a
marvelous book when you read it in English
without any cultural background at all. When I
read it against a Mesoamerican background, it
is like the picture of the dog. Once you have
see the connections and you have connected
the dots, you can’t go back. It reads that way.
I see Mesoamerica every time I read the Book
of Mormon. I see the culture of those people,
and I don’t see the Nephites’ being Maya. I
see them participating in the culture, and I see
the evidence of what the Book of Mormon
peoples were fighting against. Just like we
learn about Baal in the Old Testament,
because the prophets fought against them, we
can learn something about the world in which
the Nephites lived by learning about what they
BMAF 2004 Fall Conference 52
fought against. What they fought against is
exactly what was happening in Mesoamerica,
that was exactly at the time that the Book of
Mormon says it was happening. Thank you.
_____
Copyright 2005, Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum, a non-profit organization. Salt Lake City, Utah.