147.1 THE HILL CUMORAH IN SOUTHERN MEXICO?

A summary of In Search of Cumorah: New Evidences for the Book of Mormon From Ancient Mexico

 by David A. Palmer

(Horizon Publishers: P.O. Box 490, Bountiful, Utah 84010, 1981; 254 pp; $9.95). Summary by the author.

Most members of the SEHA have long been aware that the Hill Cumorah in the state of New York is not necessarily the hill spoken of by Mormon as the place where the last Jaredite and Nephite battles occurred. In fact, for more than three decades Professor M. Wells Jakeman and his associates and students at BYU have been researching geographies that place all Book of Mormon events in a restricted region surrounding the Isthmus of Tehuántepec (cf. above, 147.0). However, in spite of acceptance of the "two Cumorah" view by such scholars as Sidney B. Sperry, studies of Book of Mormon geography have not been well received in the LDS church at large, perhaps because of the prevailing tradition that there was just one such hill.

The author has set out to meet the Cumorah challenge head on, with the hope that a full discussion of the issue will improve receptivity toward studies by other scholars of Book of Mormon geography and archaeology in general. His thinking has been influenced by courses in the BYU archaeology department, considerable personal communication with the faculty, insights developed during the SEHA expedition of 1977 (reported at the Annual Symposium of 1978; see Newsl. and Proc., 143.2) and other trips to Mexico, and considerable research in some of the best Mesoamerican library collections in the United States.

The author points to a site on the Gulf Coast of Mexico among the Tuxtla Mountains as the location of the last battle and the repository of the Nephite library. He tests this theory as well as the New York "one Cumorah" theory, b~ developing criteria based on quotations from the Book of Mormon itself-13 of them geographical and 15, archaeological-cultural which must be met by any proposed location of Mormon's Cumorah.

The general archaeology of the eastern United States and the specific archaeology of western New York are discussed in evaluating the New York theory. According to William A. Ritchie, the leading expert in the archaeology of that state, the Palmyra area had no communities with over 500 inhabitants prior to AD 1100, while the cultural level before that date was one of simple hunting and fishing, without agriculture. Besides failing most archaeological criteria, the New York location fails many of the geographical ones as well.

The Hill Vigia in southern Mexico is next subjected to the same set of criteria and is found to meet them all. The author feels that this does not prove the correct hill has been identified but insists that any other candidate must also pass the same screening process. The Hill Vigia is surrounded by rivers and fountains which flow out of the hills from underground sources. Its vicinity is the ecological climax area of Mesoamerica, where two to three crops per year are grown. He suggests that the abundance of water aided food production in ancient times, which was related to the military advantage of numbers sought by General Mormon (cf. Morm. 6:4).

The hill is surrounded by ruin-mounds that date to both Jaredite and Nephite times. On the west are the ruins of Tres Zapotes, where Matthew W. Stirling found the monument with a Maya Long Count date of 31 BC (Goodman-Thompson-Martinez correlation). A layer of volcanic ash found there, and remains of eruptions in the Valley of Mexico and El Salvador, are examined and found to correlate, within experimental accuracy, to the destructions at the time of the Crucifixion.

With evidence that the Jaredites fought their last battle within their own heartland, the author finds this hill ideally located to correlate the Olmec civilization with the latter part of Jaredite history. The same hill is a point of contact with a newly arriving group, the Mulekites. The movements of the Mulekites past Cumorah and on to the land of Zarahemla are mapped out, based on chronicle accounts, archaeological data, and a few data provided by the Book of Mormon itself.

For many years, some have suggested that the city of Nephi is to be identified with Kaminaljuyú in Guatemala. The author has built on that hypothesis, using the latest published information from the Penn State University Kaminaljuyú Project and correlating Book of Mormon history of the city with the archaeological data, epoch by epoch. Moving northward, he relates chronicle accounts and archaeological data on the settlement at Teotihuacãn with the Nephite northward migration of 55 BC (Al. 63:4).

The author ties the scant documentary information on the period after Christ's visit to archaeological data on the city of Teotihuacãn, suggesting that it was a Nephite temple city. He speculates that it later became a center of apostasy and by AD 385 was no longer a "Nephite" city. As one of a number of possibilities, he postulates an alliance between Kaminaljuyú and Teotihuacãn designed to forge a Mesoamerican empire. The Nephites, controlling the narrow neck, had to be eliminated for strategic reasons as well as because of hatred. This could account for Maya- and Teotihuacãn-style ruins being built in the vicinity of the Hill Vigia just after the Nephite destruction, as well as the introduction of Teotihuacãn styles into Kaminaljuyú around AD 400. Abandonment of most of the sites in the Central Depression of Chiapas in the AD 300-400 time-period is also discussed as evidence of the Nephite wars and retreat to Cumorah.

The book is not a general treatment of Book of Mormon geography but introduces enough of the basic concepts so that the specific geography of Cumorah can be understood in its context. It has 10 maps, which include most of the important Jaredite- and Nephite-period ruins thus far discovered. Most of the 50 photographs in the book were taken during the SEHA Mesoamerican expedition of 1977 (cf. Newsl. and Proc., 143.2).