A South American Setting for Book of Mormon

Interesting.

So the yellow is land and the blue is water. Upon first glance, I thought it was the other way around. But that wouldn’t make sense because of the Andes. This particular rendition also doesn’t make sense because if you look at the bottom, the whole of Patagonia is left out! Those mountains, while spectacular and fairly young, are not THAT young! The Patagonias go all the way down to Antarctica.

Also the Incas WERE around at the time of the Nephite accounts, and there is absolutely nothing that I am aware of in their history that indicates such dramatic shifting of the lands.

I’m not sold on this. I stick with the mesoamerican.

Dan, Yes, there certainly are some pros and cons to the theory. Potter seems to find the Incas might be related to the Lamanites, as you mentioned, and some of the cities seem to date to the BoM period. But the Amazon River doesn’t seem to follow the north-south area of the map. It is more east-west–see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_river

Rick M, I just attended one of Meldrum’s presentations this past week. IMO, he cherry picks much of Joseph Smith’s statements on the BoM, and he isn’t heavily into the science, but rather the prophecy about the Lamanites. Clearly, Joseph believed in a hemispheric model, but if you listen to Meldrum’s presentation, he completely ignores much of the quotes that Smith said regarding South and Central America. Also, the Hopewell people don’t seem to be a very good fit for the Lamanites. The Hopewell were practically stone age technologically, and don’t seem to have the wheel, steel swords, or great cities mentioned in the BoM. I’ve also heard that Meldrum’s DNA is 20 years old, and that newer tests have discounted his findings. I’m not a DNA expert, but that is what I have heard.

I do like to look at other theories too. Mesoamerica has strengths, but also weaknesses.

They note that the rain forests are below sea level even today

Umm, no they’re not. The rain forest is drained by either the Amazon or the Orinoco both of which still flow downhill.

No real time to consider much today, so just a quick question:

Are there areas in this theory that would fit the Limited Geography Model? Iow, what is the possibility that it was South American, but in a limited area?

Elephants, silks, and metal swords do not seem to exist here.

Isn’t this a downside to any New World setting of the BoM stories, not just this particular theory?

MH,
One reason I am skeptical of the Malay theory is the number of “on this continent” type quotes that surround the prophet Joseph Smith. I find it hard to believe that he was wrong on all of these inspirations. That, of course is a matter of faith and not strictly science.

When I watched Meldrum’s presentation I thought he presented a case for the cities and temples of those (Hopewell) people. They, of course would be made of wood as is stated in the BoM and therefore would be less likely to last multigenerationally even if made from the native hardwood that grows in that area.

Are you expecting cement as it is mixed today? I wouldn’t. I also look at that first statement and think of the vast forests of Central and South America. The Malay area doesn’t strike me as an area that was devoid of trees either. I realize it doesn’t take long for trees to grow but the jungles would have been there for quite some time as they are also known to have existed during the time before Columbus. That was one of the reasons Columbus set out, to find a new path to the far east. Wood, in my opinion, would have been plentiful. And even though there are only a couple of instances of climate being mentioned, Malay is equatorial and therefore would probably lack in the distinct seasons told of in the BoM. I can’t really see the Malay theory as very convincing, geographically. I would say the mesoamerican theory would be a better fit than the Malay. Just my opinion.

rick, did you notice the scripture above saying there was little timber? the land desolation wasn’t a jungle. sorensen’s theory says it was quite tropical. there are no seasons in meso either.

I never said the cement was the same as today, but we have found plenty of ancient building materials of all kinds , even wood.

Hmmm… I haven’t read Preddis or Kocherhans, so forgive me if I repeat. In any case, here are some additional thoughts:

PRO
The “Gate of the Sun” at Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, is a (1) temple site that (2) matches the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple, (3) has symbols appropriate for our understanding of temples, and (4) has a tank similar to a baptismal font. It dates to between 500 and 600 BC, about right for Nephi’s temple, and is in the “land southward”
An apocryphal story claims Pres. Kimball said this site was a Nephite temple, but have never tracked down the source.

Curloms and Cumoms as Llamas and Alpacas?

The west coast location, large stone buildings, and others are also good fits.

CONS
No “narrow neck of land,” No “river Sidon” flowing N-S, an abundance of timber, and a lack of evidence of major culture during the BoM time period.

Rick,

I think Sorenson has done some outstanding work in the BoM geography realm. Of course Sorenson has his own problems as well. Most alternative geographers note that Sorenson’s narrow neck of land is not narrow at all, he takes great liberty with directions of north-south, and east-west to make his theory fit, his swords are made out of wood and obsidian, rather than steel (the BoM says the steel swords rusted, wood and obsidian don’t rust), he doesn’t have elephants, silks or other things mentioned, etc.

I’m not here to say Malay is perfect, but it fixes all the above problems with Sorenson, and the DNA, while not confirmed, seems a better match than Native American DNA, the customs fit in well with Nibley’s observations that the BoM peoples acted in an “Oriental” manner, there are elephants, silks, steel swords, chariots, etc. Now I’m not an earthquake expert, so I don’t know if it has siesmic activity. Somebody on my blog posted an idea from a PhD that the lost island of Atlantis may be in the South China Sea, near Malay. Perhaps there is some scientific evidence for siesmic activity–I have no idea because I haven’t studied it that deeply yet. But it seems to me that earthquakes are all over the world. I keep hearing that Salt Lake City lies on an earthquake fault, but there hasn’t been a major earthquake in over 100 years, despite claims that it is “2nd to San Andreas”. I also lived in NH, and heard that it lies on a fault “2nd to San Andreas”. They can’t both be correct. Suffice it to say, I think earthquakes happen everywhere, and are highly unpredictable.

Clark,

Thanks for the info–I haven’t heard of that before. It seems to me that Bolivia would be part of the Amazon River, so I doubt that Kocherhans and Priddis would support that location because they appear to claim it to be under water (I did an eyeball test, so I could be wrong.) If it wasn’t under water, then that seems to put another nail in their coffin. It sounds very interesting–do you have a source for this?

I happened upon this website. I haven’t verified anything on it yet but found it interesting concerning elephants in the Americas.

http://www.2s2.com/chapmanresearch/elephant.html

I particularly found the elephant pipe, the drawings of the Michigan mound builders, and the Precolumbian entries interesting.

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf068/sf068b07.htm

I can’t tell about this site. The data is old and I would wonder about its validity but the claims are interesting.

Re: Comment # 20 The Gate of the Sun is at a site more than 12,000 feet above sea level, so I don’t think it was underwater–although I just did a goggle search which returned some intersinting evidence….I don’t know how to post links, or I’d give them to you directly. Do your own seach of “Tiahanaco” or “Tiwanaku” and “Gate of the Sun,” which will verify most of the facts. (You’ll also find a few new-age sites explaining that the site was built by aliens…)

John:

I’ve taken awhile to respond to your comment because the discussions going on at Saint’s Herald have been more urgent, but I’d like to respond now if I can.

I think you can say that the Book of Mormon’s content lies in the 19th Century only once you have resolved the historicity issue. The model we’ve built for study of the Bible focuses on a period of time in the Mid East because we can CONFIDENTLY say that earlier times surface there only as fragments of oral traditions reinterpreted in later eras.

While it is tempting to apply a similar model to study the Book of Mormon, I think that would be highly premature. I would rather call the Book a scientific anomaly, the existence of which provokes my interest as a scientist as much as a believer in the RLDS/CofChrist tradition.

I will readily admit that the best theories of a historical setting for the Nephites and Jaredites (IMO, MesoAmerica) do not well explain what we know about the BofM. And there are certainly numerous “19th Century contents” in the Book that would be inexplicable under NORMAL historical processes (i.e., in which we assume God isn’t involved in directing all of history in the first place!). But that really tests the Book against a straw man — what the Book readily asserts that it is NOT!

Instead the Book asserts that God is a whisper away, inspiring with an eye to the future as well as to the problems of the present. If you need Wesleyism in the 19th Century so people will listen to the message written in the 4th Century, God can arrange that. If you need treasure hunting in the 19th Century or tales of lost tribes to spark interest in a new religious movement, God can arrange that, and so on. The assertions about Meso may be wrong — that gets settled by what gets found in Meso — but they are internally consistent as a theory explaining events in the 19th Century.

A SCIENTIFIC treatment of the Book as a 19th Century work of fiction must also subject itself to potential falsification — it doesn’t get to simply default to “what else could it be” because it would stop being a scientific treatment in that case.

For example, if the Book of Mormon is 19th Century fiction produced by human knowledge available at that time, at minimum scientific experts of the time should have been capable of producing it so that it APPEARS TO BE FICTION.

I hate to deminish 19th Century scientists and writers, but IMO the entire Dartmouth faculty wouldn’t have produced anything like the Book of Mormon if they had been working openly to do so. The science has changed too much over the past two centuries, in ways highly educated writers of the 19th Century would never imagine science could become involved — geology, military science, oceanography (just to name some areas in my own professional background) and many other disciplines — for the fiction produced by the faculty to hold up.

The criticism here by Orson Scott Card is particularly relevant, because he’s one of the acknowledged world-class experts (with the Hugos to prove it) in faking realistic fiction about another culture.

So what I think we have is something with two possible theories (at least), neither of which explain the phenomena very well. That’s why I say it’s still an anomaly.

MH (28): I used Noah, Adam, and Genesis as examples because these stories are clearly in the realm of epic scripture, rather than historic scripture. I believe that the Biblical David is almost entirely a literary creation in terms of his personality and deeds; in other words, no historical figure did the things that later writers were inspired to write about and ascribe to David. However, that conclusion does not preclude the possibility that there was a historic leader (of some sort) named “David.” Achilles and Agamemnon may well have been historic figures, but by the time the stories of the Iliad were composed almost nothing of the historical figures would have been remembered, save for their names. I see the Biblical King David vs. the historic David as analogous to the legendary King Arthur vs. the historic Arthur.

Firetag (27): We don’t usually apply the word “fiction” to scripture. By using the term fiction, I think you’re equating scripture with historicity, even though most history is not considered scripture, and little of the scriptures relate to actual historical events. The four arbitrarily canonized gospels of the New Testament do not remotely describe the life of the historical Jesus. They are almost entirely “fiction,” if you want to use that term. For me, scripture is not history and history is not scripture. For me, scripture is not history and history is not scripture, and I think we regularly treat the Book of Mormon differently from other works of scripture when we focus exclusively on the issue of its historicity.

You’re very right that take on the Book of Mormon includes the perspective that it is a 19th-century document that does not describe actual historical events. That conclusion has been demonstrated to my satisfaction and I don’t need to review the evidence at length here. If you have the opposite conclusion, then we can amicably disagree; the last thing I want to do is attack your faith.

As far as the contemporary Dartmouth faculty goes, I think they would have produced a book that had a significantly more sophisticated understanding of the Bible and Judaism. But I think that they would have still produced a book that was replete with anachronisms (albeit different anachronisms than those in our Book of Mormon), because it essentially impossible for people to take themselves completely outside of their own context and put themselves utterly within a different context. Regardless of their scientific capacity, I do doubt that the early 19th century faculty of Dartmouth would have produced a book as inspired and inspiring as the Book of Mormon has proved itself to be.

MH:

Did I really write “boasted”? (embarrassment icon) I meant “posted”, of course.

Firetag (31): I love Jan dearly, but I’d argue the same point with her. I don’t think the word “fiction” is helpful when talking about scripture. I think it’s only a hop and a skip away from the next word you mention, “hoax.” Was the author of the Book of Deuteronomy perpetrating a hoax? You can make that technical case, certainly. However, if people imagine that the only opposite of scriptural literalism is fiction, I believe they are more likely to cling to a faulty black-and-white picture of a world that is actually filled with gray nuance.

MH (32): I think the Malay theory represents precisely the same exercise as the Tehuantepec theory. Because the Book of Mormon is not related to ancient history, all modernist attempts to understand it as actual ancient history are the same. When you insert totally alien information, such as 21st century understandings of the ancient Maya (or Malayans for that matter), you are creating something completely new. You have divorced the text from its actual context and are looking at it through an unrelated lense. The result is an original reading, but also a distorted reading. This is not necessarily a bad exercise, but it is not necessarily a useful exercise.

I’m not familiar with El Mirador or El Peten. Do you have a link?

Firetag[27]

I had to read your response to John, on June 9, 3 times – which shows how slow I am.
Permit me to paraphrase a bit. Were you saying that God provided people according to their needs in order that they might believe the message of the BofM?

MH

I saw that mormonheritic.org was shut down soon after my response to you. I hope I didn’t offend anyone. I’m new at this form of communication.

I first read Priddis about 25 years ago. One of the biggest supports in favor of it is that all of the Nephite migrations from the first landing go Northward, and some for many days. This includes Nephi’s original escape from his brothers (2 Nephi 5) to the Land of Nephi, the later Northward movement to Zarahemla, the later Northward movement up the Jaredite lands North of the narrow neck, and the Northward voyages beyond the Jaredite lands.

If they landed in Chile, this all makes sense. The long desert between Chile and Peru was the first migration. From Lake Titicaca up to Northern Peru the second. Up into Ecuador, the third. And the voyages up into Central America and Mexico. With some lost at sea ending up in Polynesia.