Talk:Limited geography model (Book of Mormon)

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Contents 1 Article title 1.1 Cumorah 2 Thinking Out Loud 3 Organization

[edit] Article title

I'm pleased to see this subject addressed in its own article, and the content is above average, but I'm not sure the title is accurate. Although the limited geography model may predominate, the article also addresses alternative models. This is as it should be, at least until there are separate articles for the other models (if ever). So perhaps a more inclusive title would be "Book of Mormon geography models", or something similar.

The content of the article wouldn't need to change appreciably. The models could be described in order of preference among scholars. The Limited Geography Model would still be addressed in more detail, since more research is available.

Paul D. Anderson 19:09, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry -- my previous comment was mistaken. I thought the term "Limited Geography" meant the Mesoamerican model only. I stand by my other comments however. I still think the title is misleading and a more general "Book of Mormon geography ..." would be better. Paul D. Anderson 19:14, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I completely agree about the title - I had to think a lot about what to call it before I created it. There may certainly be something better. I could see that there was quite a bit of misperception regarding the "limited geography" on other pages, and there is just too much material to shoehorn it into the "Archaeology and the Book of Mormon" page, which is already too large. A good example of the need for the page are the repeated comments regarding genetics in which people attempt to claim that the LGM was created in response to the genetic claims, when in reality the LGM predates the genetic issues by at least 25 years. If we were to call it "Book of Mormon geography models" (which is probably a pretty good title) then we would want to include a complete section on the Hemispheric Geography Model as well. Bochica 20:33, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

You may be right... The way I see it is this is an offspring of Archaeology and the Book of Mormon because of size constraints to specifically deal with the LGM (which is the predominant model, the only one with serious scholarly credence). I think the alternate theories need brief mention here for comparison and context, but that the other theories can be sufficiently addressed on Archaeology and the Book of Mormon. Since the other models haven't had nearly as much attention I don't think this article's focus should be pulled away from the LGM... Just my opinion... gdavies 23:08, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cumorah

As I read this article I had a big question that was never directly addresssed - that is, how does the limited geography model take into account the hill Cumorah being thousands of miles away in New York? 64.60.160.98

This is a good question, and I'll add some information about this when I get some time. According to the LGM, the final battles (both Jaredite and Nephite) occurred somewhere in Mesoamerica. There is a specific hill and location (I'll have to get back into the books to get the name and location). After the final battle, Moroni wandered for over thirty years (this is supported by the text of the BoM), and it is considered plausible that he reached the area in New York where the plates were buried. Regarding the "Hill Cumorah" in New York, it is interesting to note that this hill is a drumlin: a collection of glacial scrapings or "pile of gravel." As such, it is geologically impossible for the hill in New York to have any sort of significant cave of the type described as the repository for large quantities of Nephite records (or, by the way, for Joseph Smith to have "set up shop" to fabricate tin plates to fool the witnesses :-)). I'll be adding more to this article later, but please edit or add information (pro or con - whatever your particular POV is) as you see fit. Bochica 14:27, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Right, Mormon hid up the unabridged records (only a "one hundredth" or less of the material was included in the Golden Plates/Book of Mormon) in the Hill Cumorah, most likely the "Cerro Vigia" hill on the isthmus of tehuantepec (if I'm not mistaken), and then gave the abridged smaller set to Moroni, and these are the plates that ended up in New York. Smith or Rigdon named the (previously unnamed) hill near Smith's home "Cumorah" afterwards, although no claim is made that they were the same hill. gdavies 07:53, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, I'm working on it. In addition to the hill, there is more to be added for the Tehuantepec model on the matches of other plausible locations, such as the Land of Nephi/Guatemala and the city of Jerusalem/Waters of Mormon/Lake Atitlan. Bochica 02:26, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Also, the River Sidon has two candidates if I remember right, let's see... yes at Meridian's website they have Usumacinta and Grijalva as the two candidates, since it's described as flowing North (that narrows down the candidates a lot). The "strip of wilderness" runs east west according to the Book of Mormon, and the river Sidon is described as having it's head in the wilderness strip (Alma 22:29), strongly implying the "wilderness" was a mountain range. This also agrees with descriptions of the Gadianton robbers being both in the "mountains" and in the "wilderness". Because there are only 2 ranges in the Western Hemisphere (if I remember right) that run east west, and they're both in Guatemala/South East Mexico they've said that one or the other (or both) make up the "wilderness strip". Very useful website for this article... gdavies 02:38, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thinking Out Loud

I think we're making awesome progress on this article, and I was just envisioning where it's going to be when we're "done" (i.e. a few months down the road when major edits might start to slow). It seems like we're going to overlap a lot of material in the Archeology and the Book of Mormon article... There's a lot of gray area as to which article some material should be in (if we're wanting to avoid overlap... which isn't necessarily the case) such as the section (in A and the BoM) about the Olmecs, fauna, etc. There isn't a problem yet, but I was wondering what your thoughts on this might be. gdavies 20:36, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree that there will be a lot of overlap. My vote would be to fill out the sub-articles, and then pare down the information in the main "Archaeology and the BOM" article to the essentials. For now, however, I've been very careful not to remove much from the main article until the sub-articles are fleshed out. One thing I'd like to eventually do in the main article is to note in the individual sections that one can find certain information in the sub-article. This might avoid the issue that I see cropping up of editors adding information back into the main article that was already moved to or dealt with in detail in a sub-article (e.g. the Lemba in the Genetics section and the "narrow neck" in the LGM section - although I see that another editor eventually noticed the overlap with this article and removed that last one.) Some overlap is inevitable, but I think that we should be able to reach a good balance down the road. The same issue is true, by the way, with the main BOM article, which contains a lot of overlap with the Archaeology article, but I'm not even going to touch that one for a while. I actually prefer to build supporting articles and then work my way up, rather than down. Bochica 02:12, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good! gdavies 02:29, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Organization

I just did some various edits, rearranged a little and hid an entire section. The section material (the Oceans) was covered in the "directions" section, so I thought it might be redundant. I was about to start adding more locations, but thought we could start a list here so we can get things organized before we put it all in. Thanks! gdavies 06:36, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Here are things that I've been planning to add:

- River Sidon

- Bountiful

- Land of the Jaredites/city of Lib

- How the Moroni and the plates could have gotten to New York

Bochica 14:23, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

- Land of Nephi - Guatemala City (if I remember right...)

- Narrow strip of Wilderness

I know there are several "maps" of the LGM, and I think that would be very useful in this article. Do you guys know of anywhere we could find one of these that we could use? gdavies 17:41, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps, if we could find one whose owner would give the needed permission. My favorite is the one recently published by Garth Norman (I have a copy of the full size map). I wonder if he would give permission for a small, low res version (like the image of the map on his web site) to be used? Bochica 02:25, 6 March 2007 (UTC)