New article now online - Horses

Our midday forum at the Santa Rosa Junior College Institute went well. Daniel and Jared gave an abbreviated version of the latest presentation, focusing on accounts taken directly from the Book of Mormon. We had some nice discussions with the students afterward and everyone had a good time.

In addition, we are very excited to announce that the Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum has accepted an article adapted by Daniel from what we hope is our forthcoming book. They have published it on their website, along with other articles from their scholars and authors. From time to time, we hope to finish additional papers on interesting topics that we were not able to fit into An LDS Guide to Mesoamerica.

This first article is about the still controversial claim that there were horses in Ancient America. Horses are mentioned among the Jaredites, Nephites, and Lamanites, although not as frequently as critics might think. Over the years, LDS apologists have come up with various answers to this issue, suggesting that perhaps some other large native mammal was meant, or that these may have been small ponies that survived the last ice age, but were never used as transportation. We show that there is very strong evidence that horses as we would recognize them today were indeed in the Americas during Book of Mormon times, so that this is one issue that is quite easily resolved. We encourage you to read it and to share these findings with others.

Click here to read the article online at the BMAF website.
Click here to download a formatted, multi-page PDF of the article.

First presentation of the year

Greetings on this new year. We have a new presentation coming up soon. The Institute at Santa Rosa Junior College has invited us to do their Midweek Forum this coming week. For those in the area and available, we encourage you to drop by. It will be Wednesday 4 February at the Institute building on the SRJC campus (in Santa Rosa, of course). They provide a lunch at noon and the forum starts at 12:15.

As we keep doing these firesides and presentations, our content has been evolving. The current version focuses much more on demonstrating parallels between Book of Mormon passages and the sites, history, and artifacts we have studied. So even if you have seen it once, it's all new again!