What ground rules are helpful in considering Book of Mormon geography? First, the Book of Mormon is a real record of a real people who lived in a real time. Therefore, water should be found where water is described. Mountains should exist where mountains are described. The relationships between waterways, mountains, and valleys should all fit within the proposed geography.

Granted, after the crucifixion of Christ, the Book of Mormon describes significant changes in the land including violent destruction and earthquakes. 3 Nephi 8:11-12 tells us: "And there was a great and terrible destruction in the land southward. But behold, there was a more great and terrible destruction in the land northward; for behold, the whole face of the land was changed, because of the tempest and the whirlwinds, and the thunderings and the lightnings, and the exceedingly great quaking of the whole earth." The statement that "the whole face of the land was changed" certainly sounds dramatic, but what does it mean? The Book of Mormon uses "face of the land" to mean its surface. People live on the "face of the land" (1 Ne. 13:30, 2 Ne. 30:7, Mosiah 29:32, Hel. 11:32, etc.). Trees are on the face of the land" (Hel. 3:7-9), and the "face of the land" can be a simple generic statement for "where we are" (Hel. 11:18, 16:22). When the "face of the land" is changed, it is therefore the visible parts of the land. The types of destructive forces described in 3 Nephi could change the face of the land through earthquakes, volcanic action, and destructive winds, but there is no indication that basic principles of geography were altered. North does not become south. Geographic strata are not reshuffled. They might rise or lower, but they remain ordered. The laws of geology tell us that, in spite of catastrophic upheavals, the topography remains generally the same.

Mount St. Helens in Oregon blew off its top portion in 1980, but the mountain itself did not move. In 1900, a hurricane hit Galveston, Texas, in one of the worst natural disasters ever recorded in the United States. However, we still know where Galveston is. In modern upheavals that match descriptions of the types of destruction mentioned in the Book of Mormon, the changes literally happen to the face of the earth, but overall geography remains intact. Indeed, Mormon appears to have had no problem relating to the geography of events before the cataclysms accompanying Christ's death, even though, naturally, he knew the topography only after those catastrophes. Despite the record of devastated cities, it is not unreasonable to suppose that most geographic features continued to exist.

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The third ground rule is history. Just as the cataclysms at the time of Christ's death did not fundamentally alter geography, the Book of Mormon does not fundamentally alter history. The text must fit into history, not vice versa. A great deal has been reconstructed anthropologically and archaeologically about the peopling of the New World, and it shows that a wide variety of ancestral peoples with no relationship at all to the Lehite migration inhabited this hemisphere. It is most important to read the Book of Mormon for what it says about itself, rather than for what has been traditionally said about it. For instance, it has been traditional to assume that the Book of Mormon explains the origins of all Native Americans, a tradition that traces to the earliest days of the publication of the Book of Mormon and which has been carried down to our own generation in authoritative statements.

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Few proposed geographic models have been analyzed with such a framework, and very few stand up under this type of rigorous internal scrutiny. Nevertheless, these internal textual guides provide useful ways of evaluating various geographic theories.

The Hemispheric Model: The first model of Book of Mormon geography covered the entire hemisphere, locating the narrow neck of land as the Isthmus of Panama, the North American continent as the land northward, and the South American continent as the land southward. It is obvious from numerous statements that this was not only the earliest conception of the geography of the Book of Mormon, but the most influential, coloring the perception of the Book of Mormon's relationship to all Native American populations. Accepting the entire hemisphere as the location for the Book of Mormon led to the assumption that the Book of Mormon explained all of the population of the Americas and that all Native Americans were therefore Lamanites. This usage persists.

While the hemispheric model has the advantage of antiquity and authority in terms of its prominence in many sermons, it simply cannot be correct. Using the text as our real authority, the internal reconstruction of distances does not allow the huge expanse of the hemisphere. The archaeological and anthropological evidence are also clear that there were people in the New World prior to any mentioned in the Book of Mormon, and that the traceable genetic heritage of the Native Americans currently points clearly to massive infusions of populations from Asia rather than the Middle East.

While the idea still has a few adherents, the majority of authors working on Book of Mormon geography have realized that the book itself cannot support the hemispheric model. We must look elsewhere.

The South American Model: A few proposals have been made attempting to identify the South American continent with the Book of Mormon. Apparently Heber Comer made the earliest form of this proposal in 1880 with some supervision by Karl G. Maeser. This hypothesis also flounders on the problem of distance, locating most of the important events near the Isthmus of Panama, but identifying a landing site farther south than travel time allows.

Arthur Kocherhans locates the action in South America, but his theory requires that Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina were submerged until the time of the crucifixion when they rose from the sea. While this hypothesis produces an otherwise reasonable geography, the archaeological evidence of thriving populations in Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina at the time they were supposedly under water is irrefutable. There is no evidence to support the theory besides its way out of a geographical problem, and much evidence that it could not have happened.

The New York Cumorah Model: This model updates traditional Book of Mormon geography, locating the site of the last Nephite battle in New York with the Great Lakes serving as the "seas." It has a growing number of modern adherents. In 1983, Vernal Holley, a critic of the Church, expounded this model to show that Joseph Smith must have stolen the names and geography from that area when he wrote the Book of Mormon as a work of fraudulent fiction. A more faithful rendition of the same geography model is Delbert W. Curtis's 1988 The Land of the Nephites. There are, however, several problems with any geography placing a significant number of Book of Mormon locations in the American northeast.

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The Mesoamerican Model: The model most widely accepted by serious scholars places Book of Mormon action in a limited area around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The three most widely available and most thoroughly argued developments of this model are Sorenson's An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (1985), Richard Hauck's Deciphering the Geography of the Book of Mormon: Settlements and Routes in Ancient America, and Joseph Allen's Exploring the Lands of the Book of Mormon (1989). A well thought out and important fourth model is available online, as articulated by Larry Poulsen.

The attractions of this model are fairly clear. It provides a narrow neck of land (the Isthmus of Tehuantepec). This area produced the only known examples of indigenous writing. Because the Book of Mormon is de facto evidence of literacy, it makes some sense to begin looking in the only location on the hemisphere with a written language.