How this was built

What is in the data, where it came from, and what it is not.

What is here

113 events, 110 people, 15 wars and 103 places, spanning from the great tower to the sealing of the record in AD 421. Every record carries a citation. If something here does not match the text, the text wins — the citation is there so you can check.

The dates

The book dates itself, three different ways, and switches between them mid-narrative:

Years since Lehi left Jerusalem, used from 1 Nephi through the small plates. "Thirty years had passed away from the time we left Jerusalem" (2 Nephi 5:28) is 570 BC.
Years of the reign of the judges, beginning 91 BC. Alma and Helaman are dated almost entirely in it.
Years since the sign of Christ's birth, adopted deliberately in AD 2 — "they began to reckon their time from the period when the sign was given" (3 Nephi 2:8).

The atlas will number the year in any of the three, and greys out the ones that were not yet in use — which is itself worth seeing. There is no judge-year before 91 BC because there were no judges.

BC/AD dating is editorial. It comes from the chapter headings of the Latter-day Saint edition, not from the text, which never says "BC". It is the default here because it is the shared reference everyone has.

The Jaredite problem

The book of Ether gives thirty generations and almost no years. Placing those generations on a calendar means inventing precision the record does not have. What this atlas does instead: spread the thirty generations evenly across the span the nation occupies, mark every one of them relative, and say so on the card. Their bars are sequence, not dates. Read them as "eleventh of thirty," never as "about 1,900 BC."

The map

The internal map is a diagram, in the sense that a subway map is a diagram: it gets the relationships right and makes no promise about distances or coordinates. Every position is derived from statements in the text about direction, adjacency and travel time. Each place carries how firmly the text fixes it:

textual — the text states it outright ("north of the land of Zarahemla", "by the head of the river Sidon")
inferred — it follows from a march, a border list, or the order of a campaign
unknown — the place is named and never located. These are drawn hollow, and hidden by default. Turn on "Places the text does not fix" in the left rail to see how many there are.

That last category matters. Ten of the sixteen cities destroyed in AD 34 are named once, in a list, and never placed. Showing them as confident dots would be a lie about how much we know.

Who holds the ground

The colour of each band is who the record says holds it in that year. Where a span is genuinely contested or changes hands inside it, it is coloured as contested rather than picked for one side. Where the record says nothing about anyone living there — most of the land northward for five centuries after the Jaredites — it is left grey, which is not the same as empty.

The most striking thing the colours show is not a war. It is AD 34 to 200, when every band turns one colour, because "there were no manner of -ites; but they were in one, the children of Christ" (4 Nephi 1:17). A hundred and sixty-six years, twenty-two verses.

The density strip

The histogram under the era bands counts events per bucket. It is not decoration — it is the argument that the record is wildly uneven. Two thousand years of Jaredite history are nearly flat. The ninety years of the reign of the judges are a wall. Four Nephi's two centuries of peace are a gap, because peace does not generate incident.

What this is not

It is not a claim about archaeology, geography or history outside the text.
It is not neutral about what the book says, and it is scrupulously neutral about where it happened. Those are different questions.
It is not a substitute for reading. Every card ends in a citation for a reason.

Sources, licences and affiliation

This site is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Intellectual Reserve, Inc., nor to any of the authors whose geographic models are described on the models page. Their positions are summarised here in our own words; any error in the summary is ours, not theirs.

The text of the Book of Mormon was first published in 1830 and is in the public domain. Quotations here are from that text. The chapter headings, footnotes, cross-references and study aids in the modern Latter-day Saint edition are a separate, copyrighted work, and none of them are reproduced here — every summary on this site is written from scratch.

Chapter dates are scholarly conclusions about what the text says, not quotations of anyone's edition. Where this atlas differs from a published chronology, the citation on the card is how to check it.

Software

Corrections

Dates, placements and characterisations here are judgement calls made against the text, and some of them are arguable. If one is wrong, the citation on the card is where to start.