From the time the Book of Mormon was published, its readers have speculated about its geographical setting. Following is a lively debate between two thoughtful scholars who have very different theories. To motivate study of this topic, the Religious Educator offers their two very different viewpoints.

In recent years, many scholars interested in Book of Mormon geography have argued that the events of the Book of Mormon played themselves out in a Mesoamerican setting. Repudiating earlier and widespread assumptions that the “narrow neck of land” that figures so prominently in the book’s geography was the Isthmus of Panama and that the Nephites’ and Lamanites’ history ranged over the whole of North and South America, many now think that a restricted geography around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec provides the best setting for the book’s events in light of such considerations as recent archeological discoveries and the distances and geographical features mentioned and implied in the book itself.[1] Others have suggested limited sites centered in the eastern United States, specifically near the Susquehanna River and around the Great Lakes;[2] these proposals, however, have been convincingly discounted on the grounds that they fail to account for some of the more salient geographical features mentioned in the Book of Mormon like the narrow neck of land and a prominent northward-flowing river, and for the lack of an archaeological record temporally and materially consistent with evidence from the book.[3]

In this paper, I examine two important pillars of this thesis: first, that the geographical descriptions provided in the text itself require that the final battles of the Jaredites and Nephites took place relatively close to both peoples’ centers of civilization near the narrow neck of land; and second, that the hill where Joseph Smith found the gold plates does not match the Book of Mormon’s descriptions of the hill where the final battles took place.[4] I argue that both ideas, in spite of how widely they have been accepted, are based more on assumptions about the text than a close reading of it and that the text does not require either—indeed, there is much in the text that suggests that the distance between the narrow neck of land and the site of the final battles was quite large. Stated differently, the idea that the final battles took place far from the center of most of the other activities discussed in the book is consistent with all the logical requirements of the text, and the hill in upstate New York—or one like it—meets every real requirement the text places on the Book of Mormon’s hill.

Through all of this, I am not arguing that the New York hill is necessarily the same hill mentioned in the Book of Mormon or that the final battles were necessarily fought a great distance from the book’s other events. Also, I am looking only at the requirements of the text and not at other considerations that would need to be taken into account to develop a full model of Book of Mormon geography. The point is simply that there is nothing in the text requiring the final battles of the Nephites and Jaredites to have taken place within a few hundred miles of the land of Zarahemla or the narrow neck of land and near a hill of a vastly different nature than New York’s Hill Cumorah. The paper concludes with implications these observations hold for future research into the question of Book of Mormon geography and some suggestions for how that research might proceed.

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Just as early Spanish descriptions of Central American peoples and ruins have shed light on a Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon,[63] so might the records of early explorers, missionaries, and settlers in North America shed some light on a possible Jaredite and Nephite backcountry in the north. Such sources and resources have received very little attention in the past from trained scholars, some of whom have quickly dismissed them as “very old gossip and folklore,” “old hearsay,” or a “credulous mishmash of opinions.”[64] This charge, to a degree, is true; one reading these sources quickly finds himself buried in suppositions about Persians, Tartars, antediluvians, and other explanations growing out of the sources on ancient peoples available to nineteenth-century Americans. At the same time, many of the sites and artifacts are still around today and have subsequently been classified as representative of the Adena and Hopewell cultures mentioned above.[65] While we might be inclined to disagree with early Americans’ interpretations of what they saw, their descriptions of the ruins, artifacts, native vocabularies, native practices, and native traditions that they found so suggestive of biblical and classical civilizations constitute an important source for understanding pre-Columbian America.[66] At the very least, such sources deserve the careful scrutiny of Book of Mormon scholars trained in archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, history, linguistics, and comparative religion before they are rejected as irrelevant to Book of Mormon studies.[67]

Some of these sources even have the potential to help us solve long-standing difficulties the Book of Mormon presents. As just one example, Josiah Priest, in his popular American Antiquities, describes a cave on the Ohio river in which pictures of three animals “like the elephant in all respects except the tusk and tail” are found, along with representations of human figures whose clothing “resembles the Roman.”[68] Given the problem the elephants of the Jaredites have presented to defenders of the Book of Mormon over the years, we should ask, where did Priest get his information? Are there other contemporary descriptions of this cave and its pictures? If there really was such a cave with pictures, where is it located? Are the pictures still visible? Are there, or were there, datable remains in the cave or in the immediate area? Priest’s book and many other early publications and records like it contain all sorts of tantalizing hints like this,[69] and while the possibility is very real that many of these reports are more legend, imagination, and even fraud than anything, it would be inexcusable for students of the Book of Mormon to brush them aside as such without further scrutiny.

These are just a few of the research ideas that suggest themselves when one is willing to consider the possibility that Cumorah lay north of Mesoamerica. Some are probably more viable than others, and all are open to debate. The point, though, is that rather than leading to a dead end, a reconsideration of the geographical requirements of the Book of Mormon appears to open up several avenues for potential research into a variety of Book of Mormon topics, and not just geography. Where these avenues might lead remains to be seen; at this point, the fact that such opportunities exist in this direction should be considered significant. Insofar as they appear to be viable in terms of the requirements of the text, it seems clear that they are worth pursuing as part of our larger effort to identify and better understand the peoples, setting, and meaning of this remarkable book.