Where in the world
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints takes no position on where the Book of Mormon happened. Neither does this site. Here is what the published models propose, side by side.
The atlas defaults to an internal map: a diagram built only from the text's own statements of direction, distance and adjacency. That map makes no claim about Earth, which is why it can be shown to anyone. The models below do make claims, and they disagree with each other sharply. Two of them publish enough detail to be pinned on a real map, and you can switch to that view from the atlas under Real world.
Mesoamerican (limited geography)
An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (1985); Mormon's Codex (2013)
Places the whole record inside a few hundred miles of southern Mexico and Guatemala. The narrow neck is the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the river Sidon is the Grijalva, the land of Nephi is the Guatemalan highlands, and the Nephite Cumorah is a hill in Veracruz rather than the one in New York.
River Sidon = the Grijalva, flowing north into the Gulf of Mexico.
What it has going for it
- The distances work: a day and a half across the neck, and eleven to twenty-one days between the major lands, fit the terrain
- The only region in the Americas with writing, cement, cities and warfare at the right dates
- Explains the record's "up to the land of Nephi" and "down to Zarahemla" as real elevation change
What is held against it
- Requires the hill where Joseph Smith found the plates to be a different hill from the Cumorah of the last battle
- Directions have to be read as a rotated compass in places
Heartland
Rediscovering the Book of Mormon Remnant through DNA (2009) and related publications
Places the record in the eastern United States. The river Sidon is the Mississippi, Zarahemla is opposite Nauvoo in Iowa, the narrow neck is the land between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and Cumorah is the hill in Manchester, New York where the plates were found.
River Sidon = the Mississippi, flowing south. Proponents read the text's "north" differently to reconcile this.
What it has going for it
- Keeps one Cumorah, and matches Joseph Smith-era statements about the plains of the Nephites
- Points to the Hopewell and Adena mound cultures, which are real, large and roughly contemporary
- D&C 125:3 gives the name Zarahemla to a settlement in Iowa
What is held against it
- The distances are very large for armies described as marching them in days
- No writing system, cement cities or highland/lowland relationship of the kind the text describes
- The neck between the lakes is far wider than a day and a half's journey
Andean / South American
A family of models rather than one book; positions differ substantially between proponents
The oldest tradition of reading, going back to the nineteenth century, which put the landing in Chile and the lands in the Andes. Modern versions vary widely in where they put the narrow neck and the final battle, so no single set of coordinates would be fair to them.
What it has going for it
- Long-standing; Andean civilisations are old, urban and literate in their own way
- A narrow coastal corridor exists
What is held against it
- No agreed internal consistency between proponents
- The two-Cumorah problem, without the Mesoamerican model's compensating distance fit
Baja California
Published as a limited-geography alternative to the Mesoamerican model
A limited-geography model on the Baja peninsula, where a genuinely narrow strip of land runs north-south between two seas. Compact enough for the marching distances, but with little archaeology of the kind the text describes.
What it has going for it
- The geography is genuinely narrow and genuinely oriented north-south
- Distances are small enough for the marches
What is held against it
- Very little supporting material culture
- Water and agriculture are hard to reconcile with the populations described
Malay peninsula
Proposed as a deliberate outlier to test the assumption that the setting must be American
Argues the internal geography fits the Malay peninsula better than anywhere in the Americas, and that the text never actually names a continent. Almost nobody holds it, and it is listed here because it is a published position and because it makes the point that the internal map, on its own, does not choose a hemisphere.
What it has going for it
- The peninsula's shape and neck fit the text's description closely
What is held against it
- Cannot be reconciled with the record's own statements about the remnant of Joseph in the promised land
- No proponent community and no follow-up research
Why the internal map is the default
Every real-world model has to solve the same problem: the text describes a land whose parts stand in fixed relationships — Nephi is up from Zarahemla, Bountiful borders Desolation, the neck is a day and a half wide, Sidon runs north with its head in a wilderness that reaches sea to sea. Those relationships are the only geography the book actually asserts. A model is an attempt to find somewhere on Earth that satisfies them.
Drawing the relationships without choosing a location is not a dodge; it is the only map the text itself supports. It also has a practical virtue: a reader who holds one of these models can still use it, because the internal relationships are the part everybody agrees on.
The two-Cumorah question
It comes up in every one of these arguments, so it is worth stating plainly. The hill where Joseph Smith said he found the plates, in Manchester, New York, is called Cumorah. The hill where Mormon says the last battle was fought is also called Cumorah. Whether they are the same hill is the single sharpest fault line between the models — the Heartland reading keeps them together, and every limited-geography reading pulls them apart, arguing that Moroni carried the plates a long way over the thirty-six years he spent alone.