Back from the conference and other good news

The morning of the conference started out with a veritable blizzard in Salt Lake City. But Daniel and Derek made it anyway, set up a table, and sold the book to attendees. It was a very interesting conference this year. The keynote speaker was Jack Welch, who gave some fascinating insights into legal procedures and possible Hebrew traditions hidden within Book of Mormon accounts.

Another high point of this year was speaker Royal Skousen, who for years has been in charge of the Critical Text Project, which attempted to recreate the most accurate original text of the Book of Mormon, using the original and printer's manuscripts. This peek into the process that resulted in our modern book of scripture brought to light the many difficulties in translation, transcription, and later editing that were required to transform this ancient record into a modern text that could be understood by us today. The conference ended with a panel of authors, discussing their opinions on whether the River Sidon is the Grijalva or the Usumacinta. It was interesting and slightly amusing to see how dogmatic and argumentative the experts can be. We hope it was all in good fun. Perhaps the best comment in the panel came from our friend Jerry Ainsworth, who ended his remarks by saying that it really didn't matter to him which river it was, since he knew the Book of Mormon was true anyway. We remain fairly open on the issue, although we have been down the Usumacinta twice and have never made it to the Grijalva yet.

Many people who attend have already purchased our book, so it's hard to keep sales up after a few years. But we did let everyone know about An LDS Guide to Mesoamerica in 2012. Many people signed our e-mail list, so we welcome all of our new fans and invite you to follow along with the blog and check out all our articles.

In other news, Daniel and Derek worked together over the weekend and were able to download all the video from our last trips to Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras. Some technical glitches had been getting in the way, so this was quite the success for us. Now that the videos are on our hard drives, we will be able to prepare them to share, so stay tuned for new uploads to YouTube. Currently, Daniel has been studying the Maya Long Count calendar and what is supposed to happen next year. That information will be contained in its own chapter in our next book, so that's another reason to be excited about it. Using qualified Maya experts as his source, Daniel has found some surprising elements in the calendar that are probably not known to many people and has been looking for evidences of its use by Book of Mormon cultures.