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Over at a A Choice Land you can look up a proposed model for The Book of Mormon geography. Their location of Nephihah largely matches my analysis. It protects the approach towards the city of Zarahemla and you can even see a modern road that runs through this area. There is rough terrain west of the river that could act as the "cliff" side that Moroni entered the city from. And there is more open land to the east the river where the road is. The East side of the city is where the Lamanite army was encamped facing the Nephite army outside the city. The tentative placement of this city by the authors of A Choice Land correspond to its strategic importance and tactical strength as I described in an earlier post.
This is only one of many models out there and my use of this site does not necessarily consist of an endorsement of their thesis. I do think they have one of the most visually pleasing sites and their use of google Earth adds to the study of Book of Mormon lands.
What do you think? Based on other geographic models does anybody have any other ideas?
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2 comments:
I'm somewhat familiar with this theory. They do have some cool satellite photos. I need to do a review of the site sometime. Perhaps we can team up!
As I recall, it seems pretty good as far as a peninsula and weather are concerned. It seems like it was lacking on language, DNA, and animal artifacts. It is a relatively new theory, and I think they haven't worked through all the issues yet, so perhaps they'll come up with some better explanations in the future.
According to their website, they only launced earlier this year. They are also very corteous in replying to your feedback. They answered several initial questions I had, but I had a couple more problems with their model that I haven't asked them about yet:
1. They argue that the average structure in the BoM would not leave archaeological evidence. But a recent article by John E. Clark argues that even wooden structures would leave evidence such as the holes that the main beams were placed in, and their basic outline. So they seem to be wrong on that account.
2. I think that the population centers required to field an army of almost a quarter million would be pretty easy to find. So their argument that we await further study seems to ring hollow when those kinds of huge cities should be easy to find (because modern cities would also be built in the same locations).
3. Why would the victorious Lamanites leave all their cities behind? There should have been a fairly large and distinct tribe from the Baja area that left a great deal of evidence if the Lamanites could wipe out a quarter of a million people and have their own nation for a thousand years.
So I guess thats my long way of saying there is plenty to critique about this theory.
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