John L. Sorenson

Sorenson argues that English animal names need not identify the modern species readers associate with them, since migrants often reuse familiar names for unfamiliar species. He also argues that limited excavation makes judgments from missing crops provisional, using discoveries of pre-Columbian barley to illustrate how the material record can change.

• John L. Sorenson, “Digging into the Book of Mormon: Our Changing Understanding of Ancient America and Its Scripture, Part 2,” Ensign 14, no. 10 (1984): 12–23.
• John L. Sorenson, “Instant Expertise on Book of Mormon Archaeology,” BYU Studies 16, no. 3 (1976): 429–432.

Animal naming practices among new settlers worldwide warn us against such oversimplification.

Sorenson argues that the Book of Mormon is an ancient Mesoamerican record translated by Joseph Smith. His cumulative case rests on the fit between the book’s geography, social life, and historical sequence and the region’s archaeological and cultural record, which he holds a nineteenth-century author could not have supplied.

• John L. Sorenson, Mormon’s Codex: An Ancient American Book (Deseret Book and Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2013).
• John L. Sorenson, “Reading Mormon’s Codex,” FAIR Conference (2012).

No such facile interpretations can account for the abundance of Mesoamerican culture and history that my book points out.