This project asked a simple question: if you take the Book of Mormon at its word, treating its descriptions of geography, material culture, flora, fauna, technology, government, religion, and warfare as a coherent portrait of a real civilization, which place on earth does that portrait most resemble?
This is a verisimilitude question, not a historicity question. We are not asking whether the Book of Mormon is true. We are asking which proposed setting, if any, produces the fewest contradictions and the most structural matches when measured against what the text actually says. Seven models were tested against 83 criteria extracted from the text itself, scored on a 0-4 scale across 12 categories: Flora, Fauna, Metallurgy, Writing Systems, Weapons and Military, Economy, Government and Law, Religion and Temples, Transport, Demographics, Chronology, and Physical Geography.
| Rank | Model | Score | Percentage | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | South India / Taprobane | 293/332 | 88% | |
| 2 | Malay Peninsula (Wiang Sa) | 218/332 | 66% | |
| 3 | Mesoamerican (Limited Geography) | 175/332 | 53% | |
| 4 | Mexican Highland (Continental) | 172/332 | 52% | |
| 5 | Panama | 103/332 | 31% | |
| 6 | Heartland (North America) | 83/332 | 25% | |
| 7 | Baja California | 25/332 | 8% |
The South India/Taprobane model scores 88% across 83 criteria. It achieves perfect scores in two categories (Weapons/Military and Religion), scores above 85% in eight of twelve categories, and never drops below 72%. Its weakest category is Flora (72%), followed by Physical Geography (77%, now tied with Malay). It leads in every category.
What makes this result striking is not just the aggregate score but the pattern. The BOM describes a very specific kind of civilization: one that works gold, silver, copper, iron, and steel; fights with swords, cimeters, and armor; rides chariots and builds ships; writes on metal plates; grows wheat, barley, and silk; raises horses, cattle, goats, elephants, and swine; builds temples and maintains competing religious traditions; operates a sophisticated monetary system with named denominations; and governs through kings, judges, and written law codes. That is not a generic ancient civilization. It is a particular technological and cultural package, and it maps onto ancient South India with a specificity that no other proposed geography approaches.
Consider the items where the South India model scores 4 (full structural match) and most other models score 0-1:
Elephants. Central to Tamil and Sinhalese civilization. Sangam literature records twelve type-names for elephants. The Arthashastra devotes chapters to their military deployment. The BOM says they were "useful unto man." Only South India and the Malay Peninsula have elephants.
Iron and steel. Wootz (crucible) steel was invented in South India. Excavations at Kadebakele (Karnataka) date high-carbon steel to 800-440 BC, among the world's earliest. The BOM distinguishes "iron" from "steel" as separate materials, which maps directly onto the Indian distinction between wrought iron and wootz.
Cimeters. The curved sword is native to Indian and Persian warfare. No New World culture used curved swords. The BOM names them specifically and repeatedly. Only South India and the Malay model (through Indianization) can account for them.
Chariots. Present in Indian warfare and ceremony from the Vedic period. No pre-Columbian American culture used wheeled vehicles. The BOM describes chariots in both military and ceremonial contexts. Only South India scores above 1.
Metal plates. India produced over 1,200 copper plate inscriptions, the richest tradition of metal-plate record-keeping in the ancient world. The Tamil-Brahmi inscriptional tradition, the Cochin Jewish copper plates, and the Tharissapalli plates all belong to this region. The BOM's central narrative device, sacred records maintained on metal plates across centuries, finds its closest real-world analogue in South Indian epigraphy.
Monetary system. The Alma 11 weight-and-measure system, with its named denominations and binary/decimal structure, resembles ancient Indian monetary systems more closely than any Mesoamerican or North American analogue. The tical/baht of Southeast Asia derives from the Indian tanka; Funan silver coinage followed the Indian ratti weight standard.
These are not peripheral details. They are pervasive features of the BOM's world, mentioned across multiple books, by multiple narrators, spanning a thousand years of narrative time. Any model that cannot account for them is not explaining the text; it is explaining it away.
The Mesoamerican model, the dominant academic model among LDS scholars since Sorenson's 1985 work, finishes at 53%. This is not a failure of effort or scholarship. Mesoamerica has genuine strengths: the Olmec-to-Maya civilizational timeline aligns well with the BOM's two-arc chronological structure (92%); the highland-lowland contrast between Guatemala and the Chiapas Depression is one of the best geographic correspondences in any model; and the institutional categories (Government, Religion, Demographics) score respectably at 75-95%.
But the material culture gap is devastating. Mesoamerica scores 8% on Metallurgy. There is no iron. There is no steel. There is no brass. There are no horses, no elephants, no cattle, no goats, no donkeys (Fauna: 20%). There are no chariots (Transport: 44%). There are no cimeters. There is no wheat, no barley, no silk, no flax (Flora: 41%). The standard apologetic response to each of these absences is "loan-shifting," the argument that the BOM authors used familiar terms for unfamiliar New World items (tapir for horse, obsidian-edged macuahuitl for sword, etc.). Loan-shifting is a real linguistic phenomenon. But when a model requires loan-shifting for horses, cattle, goats, elephants, iron, steel, brass, wheat, barley, silk, chariots, and cimeters simultaneously, the cumulative weight of those substitutions becomes its own argument. At what point does "the author used a different word" become indistinguishable from "the text describes a different place"?
The narrow neck problem compounds the material culture gap. The text says the line from east to west sea was "a day and a half's journey for a Nephite." The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is approximately 200 km wide, which is 6-8 days' walk. Clark's expansion of 1.5 days to 4 USD, achieved by arguing that the text's "east" does not mean "east sea," is the load-bearing interpretive assumption in the entire Mesoamerican geographic model. Without it, the geography does not work. With it, the geography requires an additional assumption the text does not demand.