The Fascination with the Mesoamerican Model

It seems as though there has been over the years a singular purpose in many professors and department leaders at BYU, who have taught hundreds of archaeology students, as well as students who went on to write books on the singular issue of the location for the Book of Mormon. This is rarely a credit to looking for the truth. Imagine where the world of the Christian Religion would be if dissenters from the Catholic Church had not questioned and provided alternative thought.
    Had it not been for men like Martin Luther, John Wesley, John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Erasmus, and Thomas Moore, it is unlikely that we would have the civil liberties we have today, nor would society have evolved to the point where the truth of the gospel could have been restored.

For many years the Land of Promise location was all that was publicized in the LDS community

Fundamentally, most educated people recognize the importance of having more than one view on a matter. After all, if one only knows of a single answer, it is not likely that person will search for an alternative unless there are negative feelings toward that answer.
    In fact is said that “All genuinely creative ideas are initially met with rejection, since they necessarily threaten the status quo. An enthusiastic reception for a new idea is a sure sign that it is not original” (Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley, Simon Schuster, NY, 2016).
    This is the problem we face with theorists of the Mesoamerican model of the Book of Mormon geography. To understand how this was created, we need to take a look at why and how long has Mesoamerica been considered by theorists and members alike as the location of the Land of Promise.
    In the 1930’s. as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, M. Wells Jakeman founded the Itzan Society with a handful of LDS friends. These included Milton R. Hunter, Hugh W. Nibley, and Thomas Stuart Ferguson. This was the first LDS organization dedicated to serious Book of Mormon geographical research.
    Its successor was the University Archaeological Society (UAS) at BYU which became the Society for Early Historic Archaeology (SEHA). When SEHA ceased operations in the 1980’s, most of its assets passed to the newly-formed Foundation for Ancient and Historic Studies (FAHS), which was soon renamed Covenant Foundation. Covenant Foundation changed its name to Ancient America Foundation (AAF) in 1984.

Key people involved in the formation of AAF included Paul R. Cheesman (left), F. Richard Hauck, Vaughn E. Hansen, Bruce H. Jensen, Macoy A. McMurray, T. Michael Smith, and Sherman Young.
    AAF was granted preliminary non-profit status by the Internal Revenue Service in 1985. During the 1990’s and 2000’s, key people in AAF included Richard K. Miner, V. Garth Norman, and Bruce W. Warren. Kirk A. Magleby joined the organization as General Manager in 2010. That same year, AAF began funding projects managed by John W. (Jack) Welch. In 2015, major donors came forward and tasked AAF with a mission to re-vitalize Book of Mormon studies.
    AAF’s principal initiative, Book of Mormon Central, was born with Jack Welch as chairman; M. Wells Jakeman (who is often called the “Father of Book of Mormon Archaeology”); Milton R. Hunter (as a member of the First Quorum of Seventy, was called by David O. McKay to be the Church’s point man for Book of Mormon Studies); Hugh W. Nibley (was the most influential Book of Mormon scholar in the Church in his era); Thomas Stuart Ferguson (founded the New World Archaeological Foundation—NWAF); Paul R. Cheesman (the leading Book of Mormon enthusiast on the BYU religion faculty in his era); Bruce W. Warren (ceramicist, established the stratigraphic sequence at Chiapa de Corzo); F. Richard Hauck (an expert on the archaeology of Guatemala’s Salama Valley); T. Michael Smith (who led historic sites archaeology for the Church); V. Garth Norman is the world’s leading authority on the Mexican site of Izapa); and John W. Welch (who founded the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies—FARMS).

In 1946, M. Wells Jakeman, who received his Ph.D. from the University of California (at Berkeley), where he wrote his doctoral dissertation based on a combination of archaeological evidence and Spanish documents relating to the history of the Yucatan, and also the author of The Origin and History of the Mayans, came to teach at Brigham Young University and founded the department of archaeology (now anthropology), encouraged by Elder John A. Widtsoe of the Council of the Twelve. Jakeman firmly believed in the Mesoamerican setting for Book of Mormon geography andtaught it openly until his retirement in 1976, influencing a large number of BYU students and faculty and made consideration of the Mesoamerican hypothesis acceptable.
    Among the Latter-day Saint archaeologists who profited from his insights were Ross T. Christensen and John L. Sorenson, each of whom later became chairman of the same BYU department, along with V. Garth Norman, Gareth W. Lowe, and Bruce W. Warren, each of whom taught in that department, and taught about Mesoamerica as being the location of the Land of Promise of the Book of Mormon.
    Elder Widtsoe, while acknowledging that Joseph Smith “did not say where, on the American continent, Book of Mormon activities occurred,” leaned toward the Mesoamerican view (John A. Widtsoe, “Is Book of Mormon Geography Known?” Improvement Era 53/7, July 1950, 547, pp596-7)
    In April 1949, Jakeman, Warren, and others organized the University Archaeological Society (UAS) in order to provide outreach to the Latter-day Saint community on matters of Book of Mormon archaeology and geography, with all their physical work centering on Mesoamerica.
    The society’s name was changed in 1962 to Society for Early Historic Archaeology (SEHA). The official view of the society was that events described in the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica only, which remains the view of the Ancient America Foundation (AAF), which absorbed the SEHA in the late 1980s.
    Prominent Latter-day Saints who supported the Mesoamerican limited-geography view of Book of Mormon geographical setting during the 1950s and 1960s were Apostle Howard W. Hunter (who later became president of the Church)—one of Elder Howard W. Hunter’s assignments was to oversee the work of BYU’s New World Archaeology Foundation (NWAF), which performs archaeological excavations in Mesoamerica, an organization founded by Thomas Stuart Ferguson and others,

Later, the organization later became associated with BYU; Elder Milton R. Hunter of the First Council of the Seventy; renowned BYU religion professor Sidney B. Sperry; BYU religion professor (left) and SEHA board member Paul R. Cheesman; and Thomas Stuart Ferguson, founder of the New World Archaeology Foundation.
    In 1959, Fletcher B. Hammond, an SEHA member, wrote a book entitled Geography of the Book of Mormon, in which he opted for a Mesoamerican view of Nephite and Lamanite lands, with the river Sidon emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. He observed that accepting the New York hill as the location where Mormon hid the plates “disrupts and confuses the entire concept of Book of Mormon geography...All of the places and countries named in the record may be consistently assembled on a map which may cover some of the countries now known as Mexico and Central America. This cannot be done if the hill Cumorah is placed on a map in the vicinity of what is now Palmyra, New York (B. Hammond Fletcher, Geography of the Book of Mormon, Utah Printing, Salt Lake City, 1959, pp72, 89-90, 119)
    Hammond reiterated his view in a paper delivered in 1964 to the Campus Chapter of the University Archaeological Society at Brigham Young University, published by the society as a monograph, Geography of the Book of Mormon: “Where is the Hill Cumorah?”)
    During the 1960s and 1970s, the SEHA published a number of articles reinforcing the idea that Book of Mormon peoples lived in Mesoamerica. In 1981, SEHA contributor David A. Palmer published a book entitled In Search of Cumorah, in which he gave evidence from the Nephite record that sites named therein could be found in Mesoamerica. He located the hill Cumorah in the same area suggested by others (David A. Palmer, In Search of Cumorah: New Evidences for the Book of Mormon from Ancient Mexico, Horizon, Bountiful, Utah: Horizon, 1981).
    By 1984, the concept of a limited geography for Book of Mormon peoples was sufficiently widespread for the Church’s Ensign magazine to publish two articles by John L. Sorenson on the subject (John L. Sorenson, “Digging into the Book of Mormon: Our Changing Understanding of Ancient America and Its Scripture,” 2 parts, Ensign, September 1984 and October 1984). The material was drawn from the manuscript of the book that was jointly published the following year by the Church’s Deseret Book Company and the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon, Deseret and FARMS, Salt Lake City, 1985).
    While publication in these venues does not grant the status of doctrine (except in the case of official declarations from the First Presidency, sometimes in conjunction with the Twelve Apostles, Mesoamerican theorists point to the fact that it is interesting that their publication was allowed. It is also interesting that the Mesoamerican view of Book of Mormon geography is mentioned in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism under the entry “Book of Mormon Studies” and that it has been the theme of several other books, some of them written by archaeologists.

In an address to FARMS supporters on 29 October 1993, Elder Dallin H. Oaks (left) of the Council of the Twelve Apostles noted that his acceptance of the Mesoamerican view “goes back over forty years to the first class I took on the Book of Mormon at Brigham Young University: “I was introduced to the idea that the Book of Mormon is not a history of all of the people who have lived on the continents of North and South America in all ages of the earth. Up to that time I had assumed that it was...if the Book of Mormon only purports to be an account of a few peoples who inhabited a portion of the Americas during a few millennia in the past, the burden of argument changes drastically" (Dallin H. Oaks, The History of the Book of Mormon, in Paul Y. Hoskisson, ed/, Historicity and the Latter-dah Saint Scriptures, BYU Religious Studies Center, Provo, 2001, pp238-239).
    While a lot of people have dedicated themselves to a single issue, and much work has been accomplished by them, one can only wonder how much the studies of the Book of Mormon have been advanced by this method of a single issue—or in this case, a single location for the Land of Promise. Usually, monopolies are not particularly effective in finding truth, but they certainly are effective in limiting research into other possibilities. Even so, this might be excused if the Mesoamerican model really matched and supported the scriptural record and numerous descriptions left us by Mormon.
    Unfortunately, as we have shown on numerous occasions and in numberless articles, Mesoamerica does not!