Come on an adventure in Book of Mormon lands

We have some exciting news to announce. Daniel has been contacted by Cruise Lady, an LDS tour company, to headline their cruise and tour to Book of Mormon lands this fall. The cruise ship leaves from Port Canaveral in Florida on 13 October and returns on the 20th. The ship stops at ports in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, Belize, and Honduras. Maya sites visited will be Tulum, Lamanai, and Chacchobén. While at sea, Daniel will be giving presentations and firesides on these lands and their connection to Book of Mormon themes.

If you have ever thought about taking a cruise to these areas, this October is your chance! The presentations will be great opportunities to bring up and discuss all your questions and comments on these topics. Daniel will also be offering free, signed and personalized copies of An LDS Guide to Mesoamerica to the tour guests, one per household. He will also be discussing our new book, which will be out as an eBook by that time.

Daniel will accompany the group on all tours and activities on land to add insights to the sights we visit. This promises to be a great vacation and learning experience. The cruise price is based on double occupancy and the prices are quite reasonable. In order for this tour to happen, enough people need to sign up, so we are trying to get the word out. If you know someone who would like a trip like this, let them know as well. Click the image above for a larger view of the trip's details and prices.

Click here for a detailed page on this tour at Cruise Lady's site.

Continuing research sheds new light

We have been working on updating and writing new content for the new book, as the deadline is quickly approaching. In looking into hard-to-find scientific publications about the digs and excavations at Loltún and other caves in the Yucatán, Daniel has found some fascinating information about the large animals that lived in the Americas anciently. It is now known (or should be) that animals like horses and early elephants (mammoths), lived in this hemisphere during the last Ice Age. The common belief is that they all died out around 10,000 BC as the result of climate change, but additional findings keep contradicting that date and it keeps getting later and later. The Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum sent out an excerpt taken from the chapter on the Loltún Cave that will be in An LDS Guide to the Yucatán. Here is the article as written by Daniel:

In 1895, Henry Mercer explored 29 caves in the Yucatán looking for evidence of prehistoric habitation. In the Loltún Cave and others he found the bones of many ancient animals, but no fossils. Between this dig and 1977, ancient horse bones have been found in the Huechil Grotto at Loltún. Exactly how they got there is unknown, but it is probable that they were brought there by ancient inhabitants, since it is believed that early man hunted native horses. Because these bones are not fossilized, there is a limit to how old they might be. A tantalizing (but rarely mentioned) sidenote is that the horse remains in some caves were found alongside potsherds and other man-made artifacts. 

It should be recognized that on the subject of horses, the Book of Mormon was actually ahead of its time. If it had been written according to the knowledge of the day, horses would not have appeared within its pages at all. From time to time, apparently ancient horse teeth or bones had been found in North America, but they were usually dismissed or ignored. The existence of ancient, indigenous horses on the American continent was only first accepted in 1848, when Richard Owen described a fossil horse from South America. The first scientific paper on ancient horses in the Americas was published that same year by Joseph Leidy. But now, horse fossils, bones, and teeth have been found in North, Central, and South America. Many varieties of ancient American horse are known, including the Western Horse (Equus occidentalis), the Mexican Horse (Equus conversidens), the Yukon Horse (Equus lambei), Scott’s Horse (Equus scotti), and the Complex-tooth Horse (Equus complicatus). Some of these varieties were quite large, growing to the size of modern species. The remains found in the Yucatán have been classified as E. occidentalis and E. conversidens. All of these horses are now extinct, but the question of when and why they became extinct remains. It is now believed that horses, elephants, and other large animals evolved in the Americas first before migrating over the Bering Land Bridge to Asia long ago. Why they flourished there and died out here is still a mystery, especially for horses, which have thrived in the wilds of North and South America since being re-introduced by Europeans.

The bones and artifacts found in 1977 in two lateral extensions of the Huechil Grotto in the Loltún Cave, known as El Túnel and El Toro, have been described by Dr. Peter Schmidt of INAH as ‘problematic’ and ‘complicated.’ Unfortunately, very few details about the findings have been published. Most of the data come from stratigraphic excavations in El Toro. Labeled I to XVI, the levels represent the caves’ chronology, with I being the most recent and XVI the most ancient. Bones and bony fragments of Pleistocene megafauna have been found in most of El Toro’s levels, but the only published radiocarbon dating comes from levels VII and VIII. Taken from various pieces of charcoal, the date is 1805 bc, with an error of +/- 150 years, well after the Ice Age. But this is not all. ‘Sadly,’ as Dr. Schmidt laments, 44 horse bone fragments have been recovered from levels VII to II, all supposedly from earlier time periods and also containing Maya Classic and Preclassic ceramics! His article exclaims that something has happened in Loltún that is still hard to explain: The survival of extinct animals like the Mexican Horse may need to be extended to the beginnings of the ceramic era, which would not please paleontologists.

This and other hard evidence of pre-Columbian horses means that we should not be too apologetic about their appearance in the Book of Mormon, nor do we have to go to extraordinary lengths to explain them. There are still some controversial elements in the scriptural record that we may never be able to explain, but the existence of horses in Ancient America is not one of them. 

The BMAF also linked back to an earlier article on their site Daniel had written for them about horses and the Book of Mormon. These articles are apparently getting a lot of positive attention. This and much more, including photos and graphics, will be in our upcoming e-book, due out this spring. Daniel is also working on a new exciting venture that we will let you know about soon. 2012 should be an exciting year!

Click here to read the article on horses at the BMAF website.

What awaits us in 2012

Happy New Year! The year of the end of the world is upon is! Or is it? Many things are being said about 2012, but is there really a reason to worry? What did the ancient Maya believe about the upcoming date of 21 December 2012? Not to share the secret too early, but we are not that concerned. Rather, we are quite excited about this year. The Book of Mormon is the topic in Gospel Doctrine classes this year and our new book, An LDS Guide to the Yucatán, will be coming out in electronic format this spring.

One of its chapters will deal with Maya dates and the significance of 2012. For those who can't wait, the Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum has published the content of this chapter on their website. It has some really good information, based on the research of prominent Maya scholars, about this topic. It also gives some clues that suggest the Maya calendrical system may have been in use by Book of Mormon peoples.

To read the article at the BMAF's website, click here.

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.

More book news at the BMAF annual conference

Daniel will be attending the Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum's annual conference again this year. It will be this Saturday at the Sheraton hotel in downtown Salt Lake City. He had a great time as one of the speakers last year, and served double duty as he also manned a table to sell the books. This year, he will be selling the books again and telling everyone about our new book.

We have signed a contract to deliver a new manuscript to Cedar Fort next spring, so we are working on it now and looking forward to seeing it come out as an eBook next year. We have already found new information to add to sites we visited years ago, so we are excited to let everyone know that An LDS Guide to the Yucatán will be available!

Daniel's response to horses in the Book of Mormon

In July of this year, Ted Stoddard, a member of the board of advisers for the Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum, wrote a rebuttal to an article in the Mormon Times written by Linda and Richard Eyre. In that original article, they inferred that the use of the verb "bridle" in the Book of Mormon was simply an indication that Nephites had horses and used bridles. Bro. Stoddard called such a perspective "illogical, unfounded, and even deceptive."

The issue of horses in the Book of Mormon is a tricky one. It is accepted that no known Ancient American culture had horses or other draft animals. But does this extend back into Book of Mormon times? If Nephites and Lamanites did not have horses, then what animal is being described? If they did, then is there any evidence that such large animals existed on this hemisphere before Europeans 'discovered' it? Daniel has written a paper supporting the idea of actual horses in the Book of Mormon and shows evidence that modern horses did live on this continent anciently. He wrote a response to Bro. Stoddard's article that was also published by the Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum.

Click here to read Ted Stoddard's article on the BMAF website.
Click here to read Daniel's response on the BMAF website.