An LDS Guide to Mesoamerica - Hardcover

Daniel Johnson has had a lifelong interest in ancient cultures, especially from the Americas. His first trip to Mesoamerica was in 1999 and he has since led friends on excursions to Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras and has given firesides and presentations about traveling in these lands. He lives in Petaluma, California with his wife and three children. Daniel served a full-time mission in the Buenos Aires North and Mendoza, Argentina missions. He graduated from Brigham Young University and works as a digital illustrator and teaches as an adjunct instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College. Jared Cooper has been fascinated with the history of Mesoamerica all his life. He continues to hold firesides with Daniel and Derek in California stakes about Book of Mormon connections to Mesoamerica. Jared served a full-time mission in the New York, Utica mission and graduated from Brigham Young University. He received a Masters in Business Administration from the University of San Francisco and lives with his wife and four children in Petaluma, California and works as Chief Operating Officer for Integrated Network Communications, a rich media integration company. Derek Gasser has had a lifelong love of traveling and photography. He has traveled to over 60 countries and has spent extensive time volunteering in hospitals in both Africa and Asia. He lives in Petaluma, California with his wife and daughter. He served a full-time mission in the Cebu, Philippines Mission. He graduated from Brigham Young University and is currently completing a Masters in Business Administration from UC Berkeley. He works as a Hospital Administrator.

The authors, Johnson, Cooper and Gasser, make it very clear that they are not scholars on Mesoamerican history or archaeology; but, I must say, they have done their research well. Even though this book is for the layperson, they give many bits and pieces of useful information for the traveler to the sites of Mesoamerica. A photo of a gold plate/disc with hieroglyphs from Chichen Itza that they saw in storage at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, is an example of an important artifact that has been overlooked by most scholars. This find is extremely important to Latter-day Saints, since the Book of Mormon was inscribed with writing on golden plates. The three authors of An LDS Guide to Mesoamerica, walk us through the lands of the Book of Mormon. They discuss early Church assumptions as to where the people of the Book of Mormon lived, and then discuss the plausible locale that is theorized by most LDS scholars today. The authors also explain that the major sites that most tourists visit, flourished after the Book of Mormon period. However, they direct the LDS tourist to some of the pre-Columbian sites that did exist during the timeframe of the Book of Mormon, and explain that most were covered by later construction. LDS tourists often go to Mexico and Central America thinking they will see where and how the people of the descendants of Lehi s party lived. The newer construction and art motifs (they built one building on top of another for sacred reasons), carried over many of the previous era s themes, which would overlap concepts held to be true during Book of Mormon times. This book also makes for a good adventure story: the perils of navigating through roads that aren t complete and even being dynamited without warning, to spewing lava shooting fifty feet in the air from a volcano that sent the authors running for cover. I highly recommend this book to those who want to travel to the Mesoamerican sites that relate to the Book of Mormon. Read carefully the travel tips that are offered. They are excellent. --Diane Wirth