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| Stephens & Catherrwood Lithograph of Stela D, Copan Honduras |
In 1879, Orson Pratt published his new edition of The Book of Mormon with the chapter and verse divisions the LDS Church still uses today (The Community of Christ uses a different schema in their edition). Pratt was an articulate advocate for a sweeping, hemispheric vision of Book of Mormon lands with the Isthmus of Panama as the narrow neck of land. Pratt's view dominated Mormon thinking until the middle twentieth century.
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In 1899, for example, George Reynolds published his monumental A Complete Concordance of The Book of Mormon. Representing the best minds in Utah in his day, Reynolds confidently asserted that the City of Zarahemla was in the modern nation of Colombia along the west bank of the large, north-flowing Magdalena (Sidon) River.
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There was enough enthusiasm among the Saints for the Magdalena/Sidon model that the ill-fated 1900-1902 Benjamin Cluff (then President of Brigham Young Academy - later BYU) expedition left from Provo on horseback bound for Colombia to find the city of Zarahemla. One of my great-great uncles, Heber Lorenzo Magleby, was Cluff's right hand man on the trip. The two of them later became business partners, running rubber plantations in Tabasco until the Mexican Revolution forced them to return to the States.
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In Mexico, the Cluff expedition used the good offices of the first credentialed LDS archaeologist - Paul Henning. A German linguist and antiquarian who joined the Church in Mexico, Henning advocated a Mesoamerican setting for The Book of Mormon.
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In 1917, the first Reorganized LDS (now Community of Christ) archaeologist, Louis Hills, published his widely-influential Geography of Mexico and Central America from 2234 BC to 421 AD in Independence, Missouri. Community of Christ thinking has centered on the Usumacinta River as the Sidon (with special emphasis on Yaxchilan as a possible Zarahemla) ever since. Yaxchilan, it should be noted, is on the west bank of a large, north-flowing river.
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In 1946, M. Wells Jakeman, newly-minted Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, joined the BYU faculty. For decades Jakeman taught that the Usumacinta is the Sidon, correlating the city of Zarahemla with El Cayo, Chiapas and the city of Bountiful with Aguacatal, Campeche. Students who took Jakeman's archaeology of the Scriptures class were required to create their own Book of Mormon map.
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In the early 1950's, a new Grijalva/Sidon correlation came on the scene championed by Thomas Stuart Ferguson and John L. Sorenson. Sorenson and others spent most of the 1953 field season excavating around Huimanguillo, Tabasco - on the western banks of a large, north-flowing river. The field team failed to find significant pre-classic (Book of Mormon era) remains in Tabasco. (See the article "Water Fight on the River - Round Two" for a likely explanation). Near the end of the season, Ferguson went down to Mexico for a visit. Sorenson and Ferguson undertook a quick motorized reconnaissance of the Central Depression of Chiapas following the Grijalva upriver from Tuxtla Gutierrez. In the general vicinity of Chiapa de Corzo, they struck gold - pre-classic occupations everywhere they looked. Their thrill of discovery has colored the Book of Mormon/Mesoamerica correlation discussion ever since. It is no accident that the BYU-New World Archaeological Foundation Research and Study Center is in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas and much of the BYU archaeological effort over more than five decades has focused on sites within the Grijalva drainage basin and the Pacific coast of Chiapas/Guatemala (Soconusco).
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In 1974, David A. Palmer put out a call for papers and facilitated an information exchange with discussions and reviews sent around to all participants through the mail. By that time, LDS Book of Mormon scholars were largely convinced that the events described in the text took place in the limited geography of Mesoamerica. Correlations for the city of Nephi (Kaminaljuyu) and the narrow neck of land (Tehuantepec) were rapidly gaining traction, but there were 2 viable candidates for the River Sidon and Palmer was anxious to advance the cause toward consensus. Two scholars submitted papers: John L. Sorenson advocating a Santa Rosa/Zarahemla correlation along the Grijalva in 15 pages and V. Garth Norman proposing an Usumacinta/Sidon correlation without an obvious candidate for the City of Zarahemla in 150 pages. Both scholars agreed on a Ramah-Cumorah location in the Tuxtla Mountains of southern Veracruz. John Sorenson's ideas generally prevailed among the small group of discussants, although Thomas Stuart Ferguson gave a negative review and declared the problem insoluble while Robert F. Smith's review urged Sorenson to adopt more of Norman's historical contextual approach. When the forum ended in 1975, the official result was inconclusive - no consensus had been achieved. When Palmer and Bruce W. Warren undertook the Society for Early Historic Archaeology (SEHA) photographic expedition in 1977, they focused primarily on highland Guatemala, Chiapas, Veracruz, Oaxaca and the Valley of Mexico - sites generally aligned with Sorenson's Grijalva-centric model. When Palmer's In Search of Cumorah: New Evidences for the Book of Mormon from Ancient Mexico appeared in 1981, it was no surprise that John L. Sorenson's influence came through on almost every page.
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In 1983, one of our first projects after FARMS moved from Los Angeles to Provo was a multi-media slide + cassette presentation entitled "Lands of The Book of Mormon". I wrote the script and John L. Sorenson edited it. Most of the photographs came from National Geographic photographer Floyd Holdman's outstanding collection. The soundtrack was professionally recorded and mixed at a private studio in Provo. We sold over a thousand copies all over the world. John Fugal, then on the BYU religion faculty, became a huge fan of the presentation and showed it dozens of times in firesides. In the script, I wrote that LDS scholarly consensus located Book of Mormon lands in Mesoamerica (southern Mexico and northern Central America), and that the river Sidon was probably the Grijalva River that flows through Chiapas and Tabasco, or it may have been the Usumacinta River that forms the border between Guatemala and Mexico before emptying into the Bay of of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico. This pretty much summed up the situation in 1983 - Mesoamerica definitely, 2 candidate rivers, Grijalva likely.
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In 1984, I worked with John L. Sorenson to produce the acclaimed maps for his groundbreaking An Ancient American Setting for The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book & FARMS, 1985). We contracted with the cartography lab at the University of Utah. The success of John's book (it is still in print) further established the Grijalva as the leading candidate for the River Sidon.
