Posts

The Narrow Neck as Baja and the Sea of Cortez

Book of Mormon accounts are always “BY” the narrow neck, never ON the narrow neck.
“Where the sea divides the land”, NOT where the land divides the sea
Narrow Passes are never said to be ON the narrow neck .

34 And it came to pass that they did not head them until they had come to the borders of the land Desolation; and there they did head them, by the narrow pass which led by the sea into the land northward, yea, by the sea, on the west and on the east. (Alma 50:34)

9 And he also sent orders unto him that he should fortify the land Bountiful, and secure the narrow pass which led into the land northward, lest the Lamanites should obtain that point and should have power to harass them on every side. (Alma 52:9)

5 And it came to pass that Hagoth, he being an exceedingly curious man, therefore he went forth and built him an exceedingly large ship, on the borders of the land Bountiful, by the land Desolation, and launched it forth into the west sea, by the narrow neck which led into the land northward. (Alma 63:5)

6 And the Nephites and the armies of Moronihah were driven even into the land of Bountiful;
7 And there they did fortify against the Lamanites, from the west sea, even unto the east; it being a day’s journey for a Nephite, on the line which they had fortified and stationed their armies to defend their north country.(Hel 4:6–7)

29 And the Lamanites did give unto us the land northward, yea, even to the narrow passage which led into the land southward. And we did give unto the Lamanites all the land southward. (Mormon 2:29)

5 And it came to pass that I did cause my people that they should gather themselves together at the land Desolation, to a city which was in the borders, by the narrow pass which led into the land southward.
6 And there we did place our armies, that we might stop the armies of the Lamanites, that they might not get possession of any of our lands; therefore we did fortify against them with all our force. (Mormon 3:5–6)

30 And it bordered upon the land which they called Desolation, it being so far northward that it came into the land which had been peopled and been destroyed, of whose bones we have spoken, which was discovered by the people of Zarahemla, it being the place of their first landing.
31 And they came from there up into the south wilderness. Thus the land on the northward was called Desolation, and the land on the southward was called Bountiful, it being the wilderness which is filled with all manner of wild animals of every kind, a part of which had come from the land northward for food.
3
2 And now, it was only the distance of a day and a half’s journey for a Nephite, on the line Bountiful and the land Desolation, from the east to the west sea; and thus the land of Nephi and the land of Zarahemla were nearly surrounded by water, there being a small neck of land between the land northward and the land southward.
3
3 And it came to pass that the Nephites had inhabited the land Bountiful, even from the east unto the west sea, and thus the Nephites in their wisdom, with their guards and their armies, had hemmed in the Lamanites on the south, that thereby they should have no more possession on the north, that they might not overrun the land northward. (Alma 22:32–33)

19 …And in the days of Lib the poisonous serpents were destroyed. Wherefore they did go into the land southward, to hunt food for the people of the land, for the land was covered with animals of the forest. And Lib also himself became a great hunter.
20 And they built a great city by the narrow neck of land, by the place where the sea divides the land.
21 And they did preserve the land southward for a wilderness, to get game. And the whole face of the land northward was covered with inhabitants. (Ether 10:20–21)

.

Overview

I believe many of the best correlations between the Book of Mormon’s internal geography and modern archaeological findings have been missed or passed over by Book of Mormon geographers almost exclusively because of misunderstandings surrounding the ‘Narrow Neck of Land’ mentioned in the text. Although two verses in Alma 22 & Alma 50 give the impression that the narrow neck is an isthmus, nearly every other indication seems to go against this notion. In this article, we’ll go through each verse relating to the Book of Mormon narrow neck to make a case that it is actually Baja California, which in ancient times, and even among early Spanish authors, served as the predominate geographic delineator between the Land Northward and Land Southward—much the same way as the Rio Grande river and Sonoran desert serves as the main delineator between the United States and Mexico in our day. Following are just a few of the reasons why a correlation between the narrow neck and the Baja peninsula seem to be the best fit to the text.

  1. Joseph Smith seems to have believed that the land of Desolation was the desert Southwest & Eastern plains areas of the United States with Bountiful & Zarahemla in Meso/Central America (see this article). Since Desolation bordered the narrow neck, ONLY a Baja Narrow Neck can makes his model work!
  2. Not a single occurrence in the Book of Mormon is said to happen ON the narrow neck. Instead all mentions of it are in regard to being BY the narrow neck. (see Alma 50:34, Alma 63:5, Mormon 3:5–6, Ether 10:20). Not a SINGLE verse in the Book of Mormon references Bountiful or Desolation as being ON the Narrow Neck, which we would expect if traditional Tehuantepec models were correct.
  3. The language in Ether 10:20 (and possibly Alma 63:5) seems to suggest a large inlet or gulf of the sea “which divides the land”, and “leads into the land northward”, NOT necessarily an isthmus of land which divides the sea and leads to the land northward.
  4. The given widths of the ‘narrow passes’ mentioned in the Book of Mormon are FAR less than any Mesoamerican Isthmuses. (because of this, traditional Tehantepec models also suggest that the ‘narrow passes’ are not the same as the ‘narrow neck’, but coastal passes on or near it. (Alma 50:34, Alma 52:9, Alma 63:5, Mormon 2&3)
  5. None of these passes are said to go from ‘the east sea to west sea’. And none are actually mentioned in conjunction with a ‘narrow neck’. Instead, the one north of the city of Bountiful sounds like a spitbar or something extremely narrow with ocean “on the east and on the west” (Alma 50:34), and the other specifies that it goes only from the ‘east unto the west sea‘.
  6. If the ‘narrow pass’ of Alma 52:9 were an isthmus north of Zarahemla, then the statement regarding fortifying a short section or line of it so the Lamanites cant “harass Zarahemla on every side”‘ makes little sense. It makes far better sense as a narrow coastal pass which is in-line with Zarahemla such as the Xalapa pass of Veracruz, directly east of my model’s Zarahemla.
  7. If the narrow neck were an isthmus, it seems strange that the city of Bountiful or any other east coast city south of the east narrow pass of Alma 52:9 are not mentioned in regard to Nephite retreat and final battles of Mormon chapters 1-7.
  8. By far, the best archaeological correlation for the truly urban portrayal of the land of Zarahemla in Book of Mormon times (200 BC to 300 AD) is the Teotihuacan/Cholula area of the Mexican highland. But this region is largely ignored by Book of Mormon geographers because it is NORTH of Mesoamerica’s isthmuses. (see this interview of Michael Coe on Book of Mormon urbanization here)
  9. Early Mesoamerican historians like Ixlilxochitl and other Toltec historians also often mention ancient travel along an “arm of the sea” when describing the Toltec journey from their Land Northward (North America?) to their land Southward (Valley of Mexico). Their descriptions of Baja and the West Mexico Corridor of Xalisco, sound a lot like the Book of Mormon’s Narrow Neck of sea.

.

Joseph Smith on the Land of Desolation

On two, and possibly three occurrences, Joseph Smith is directly quoted by a first hand source as stating that the Book of Mormon Land of Desolation extended from the desert Southwest to the Great Plains of North America. This region is of course, one of the more obvious geographical candidates for a region where the text claims the people “did dwell in tents [teepees/wigwams], and in houses of cement [adobe/rock]” because it was one of the only North America desolate desert regions especially having “but little timber” (Hel 3:6–9). It also happens to be directly north of Mexico’s most ‘Bountiful’ population corridor which stretches from Guadalajara through Mexico City to Vera Cruz where more than half of Mexico’s population lives.

Although of late recounting, Mosiah Hancock gives a first hand account of Joseph Smith saying,

The next day the Prophet came to our home [and said,] ‘Now’, he said, ‘I will show you the travels of this people’. ‘You will build cities to the North and to the South’… ‘and you will have to go to where the Nephites lost their power… Placing his finger on the map, I should think about where Snowflake, Arizona is situated, or it could have been Mexico, he said.’ (Mosiah Hancock, Autobiography, 1834-1865 BYU Special Collections, full account available here. Original)

Levi Hancock, early friend of Joseph, member of Seventy and Council of fifty quotes Joseph Smith as saying to member of Zions Camp that the land of Desolation extended into the Great Plains.

Joseph Smith addressing himself to Sylvester Smith and said, “This is what I told you and now I want to tell you that you may know what I meant. This land [of western Missouri] was called the land of desolation and Onedages was the King and a good man was he. There in that mound did he bury his dead (Autobiography of Levi Hancock (1803-1882), pg. 27 – emphasis added. Original)

Both these quotes fall in line with Joseph’s well known support of a continental model for the Book of Mormon. But since the Book of Mormon clearly states that the Land of Desolation bordered the narrow neck, ONLY a Baja Narrow Neck can makes his model work! (see Alma 22:32–33, Alma 50:34, Alma 63:5)

Nothing in the Book of Mormon actually happens ON the Narrow Neck

It’s somewhat odd that in all the Book of Mormon accounts of occurrences in the Land of Desolation of things happening in association with the ‘narrow neck’, nothing ever happens ON the narrow neck. Instead its always explained as occurring BY the narrow neck. (Likewise the Narrow Passes are never said to be ON the Narrow Neck, but instead only BY it.)

Take Ether 10:20–21 for instance. Many Mesoamerican models attempt to equate the Jaredites almost exclusively with Olmecs living on the isthmus of Tehuantepec. But note the wording of the text for the Jaredite Narrow Neck spoken of in conjunction with Lib’s city. It isn’t built ON the narrow neck of land, but BY the narrow neck of land, BY a place where the sea divides or cuts into the land. (suggesting some kind of deep bay or inlet). And remember, the Jaredite heartland of Moron was said to be near (not on or in) “the land which is called Desolation by the Nephites” (Ether 7:6). It’s not in Bountiful or Desolation, but near Desolation, and Lib’s city is mentioned as if it’s a newly colonized area.

20 And [Lib and his people] built a great city by the narrow neck of land, by the place where the sea divides the land (Ether 10:20)

Does that wording really sound like an isthmus? Or does it sound more like the ‘narrow neck of land’ a geographic identifier representing a truly narrow neck of land / sea inlet like the Sea of Cortez & Baja Peninsula? This reading makes even more sense when we apply it to Alma 63:5 where Hagoth is said to build and launch his boat BY the Narrow Neck and yet still in the borderland of Bountiful near the Land Desolation.

5 …therefore [Haggoth] went forth and built him an exceedingly large ship, on the borders of the land Bountiful, by the land Desolation, and launched it forth into the west sea, by the narrow neck [of sea or land?] which led into the land northward. (Alma:63:5)

Again it’s unclear whether the Narrow Neck here is referring to a narrow neck of ‘land’, as in Ether 10, or a narrow neck of sea, which would actually make more sense given the context of Haggoth launching his boat.

Either way this makes little sense in relation to an isthmus like Tehuantepec, as launching south of it into the West Sea (Pacific) does not really provide much of a shortcut into the ‘land northward’ which is said to be an ‘exceedingly far distance’ and have large bodies of water and homes made of cement for lack of trees (Hel 3:4–11). It does however make a lot of sense if this is talking about the same ‘place where the water divides (cuts into) the land’ of Ether, which provides a travel corridor to take people from the mouth of the Rio Grande de Santiago in West Mexico, up the sea of Coretz to the Colorado River and into the Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora and all the regions of the ancient Puebloan people in the Desert Southwest.

The ‘Narrow Passes’ don’t go from sea to sea and are NEVER said to be ON the Narrow Neck

It’s also interesting to notice that most the time when Mormon speaks of the entire width of the land or region he lived on, he usually uses the descriptive phrase “from east sea to the west sea

-“divided from the land of Zarahemla by a narrow strip of wilderness, which ran from the sea east even to the sea west…” (Alma 22:27)
-“cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea west to the sea east…” (Hel 3:8)

But when he refers to Desolation or Bountiful on the Book of Mormon’s “Narrow Neck”, he only specifically mentions ONE sea. Almost like the ancient author might THINK it’s an isthmus of sorts, but tries to stick to the wording of the maps & texts he’s copying which NEVER clearly say “from the east sea to the west sea” as they did with other parts of the land. Instead its always explained in terms of a pass on only one sea, with an ambiguous reference to the other.

-“distance of a day and a half’s journey for a Nephite, on the line Bountiful and the land Desolation, from the east to the west sea…” (Alma 22:32)
-“fortify against the Lamanites, from the west sea, even unto the east; it being a day’s journey for a Nephite, on the line which they had fortified…” (Hel 4:7)

The Eastern ‘pass’ in particular sounds as though it’s more complex than often thought. In Alma 34, a land border dispute between the people of the lands of Lehi & Morianton leads to the people of Morianton’s flight from the southern East Coast to the Land Northward. Although we don’t know how far the people of Morianton made it on their flight northward, we are told that a Nephite army “stops their flight… by the narrow pass which led by the sea… on the west and on the east”. A peculiar wording that seems to suggest an very narrow pass like a passable spit bar or something extremely thin with obvious and visible sea on both the east and west.

34 And it came to pass that they did not head them until they had come to the borders of the land Desolation; and there they did head them, by the narrow pass which led by the sea into the land northward, yea, by the sea, on the west and on the east. (Alma 50:34)

or

.

The width of the ‘Narrow Passes’ are FAR less than Mesoamerican Isthmuses

Note that in the two examples of distances given in the Book of Mormon for the width of these passes we have a day or day and a half’s journey. Much as in the works of early Spanish codices transcribers like Ixlilxochitl, distances are always expressed in days instead of linear measurements. And although some debate exists on the distance of a day’s journey, Ixlilxochitl and most scholars place it at around 15 miles. Compare then the day and a half’s journey of Alma 22:32 and the days journey of Hel 4:6–7 (15-27 miles) to the shortest distances across Isthmuses like Tehuantepec (125 miles) or the Isthmus of Guatemala (160 miles) or even the narrowest part of the Isthmus of Darian in Panama (36 miles) and we see the problem with associating the Narrow Neck with these locations.

Even if we suggest the ‘defensive lines of Hel 4:6–7 and Alma 22:32 are simply fortified passes ON the Narrow Neck or Isthmus we still run into a MAJOR problem in all these locations, as NONE of them have defined narrow coastal passes on both sides which are 15-27 miles wide! The Northern coastal plain of Tehuantepec for instance is 50-60 miles wide! (Putting aside the fact that Tehuantepec’s passes face north and south, not east and west as the text suggests.

A place that DOES have easily fortifiable narrow coastal passes which span between the sea and steep mountain chains is northwest and northeast Mexico between the Sierra Madre Occidental, Oriental and the sea. These passes also lie directly north of Mexico’s most agriculturally ‘bountiful’ and populated region and directly south of the Sonoran desert where the landscape turns ‘desolate’, and where Joseph Smith said the land of desolation was!

In my continental model, rather than being oddities, each of these phrases end up being a truly specific description of different aspects of the ‘narrow neck’ area, which I interpret as Baja California, the Gulf of Baja or Sea of Cortez, and the narrow coastal passes between the Sierra Madre Occidental and Oriental and the east and west seas. This interpretation comes not only because it matches perfectly with the archaeology, and is really the only way to make a continental model of Book of Mormon lands which matches with both the text and early LDS prophetic statements. But also from noticing the overwhelming inclusion of the sea of Cortez in the histories and mythologies of the Aztec and other Mesoamerican cultures in the writings of early Aztec/Spanish historians like Ixlilxochtl.

In Modern times we separate the two regions of North America & Mesoamerica by the U.S./Mexican Border and the desolate central Mapimi depression/Chihuahua Desert of North Mexico. However, in both colonial and Book of Mormon times, when nearly all travel was along the West Mexico Coast, the two perhaps were colloquially separated in the minds of natives by Baja and the narrow neck of sea (the sea of Cortez & Baja), which ran parallel to a large desolate region of deserts (desolation).

Most Mesoamerican isthmuses are much, much wider than the passes or defensive lines spoken of in the Book of Mormon. Moreover, they are all south of Mesoamerica’s main pre-classic population center of the Valley of Mexico.

34 And it came to pass that they did not head them until they had come to the borders of the land Desolation; and there they did head them, by the narrow pass which led by the sea into the land northward, yea, by the sea, on the west and on the east. (Alma 50:34)

9 And he also sent orders unto him that he should fortify the land Bountiful, and secure the narrow pass which led into the land northward, lest the Lamanites should obtain that point and should have power to harass them on every side. (Alma 52:9)

5 And it came to pass that Hagoth, he being an exceedingly curious man, therefore he went forth and built him an exceedingly large ship, on the borders of the land Bountiful, by the land Desolation, and launched it forth into the west sea, by the narrow neck which led into the land northward. (Alma 63:5)

6 And the Nephites and the armies of Moronihah were driven even into the land of Bountiful;
7 And there they did fortify against the Lamanites, from the west sea, even unto the east; it being a day’s journey for a Nephite, on the line which they had fortified and stationed their armies to defend their north country.(Hel 4:6–7)

29 And the Lamanites did give unto us the land northward, yea, even to the narrow passage which led into the land southward. And we did give unto the Lamanites all the land southward. (Mormon 2:29)

5 And it came to pass that I did cause my people that they should gather themselves together at the land Desolation, to a city which was in the borders, by the narrow pass which led into the land southward.
6 And there we did place our armies, that we might stop the armies of the Lamanites, that they might not get possession of any of our lands; therefore we did fortify against them with all our force. (Mormon 3:5–6)

30 And it bordered upon the land which they called Desolation, it being so far northward that it came into the land which had been peopled and been destroyed, of whose bones we have spoken, which was discovered by the people of Zarahemla, it being the place of their first landing.
31 And they came from there up into the south wilderness. Thus the land on the northward was called Desolation, and the land on the southward was called Bountiful, it being the wilderness which is filled with all manner of wild animals of every kind, a part of which had come from the land northward for food.
3
2 And now, it was only the distance of a day and a half’s journey for a Nephite, on the line Bountiful and the land Desolation, from the east to the west sea; and thus the land of Nephi and the land of Zarahemla were nearly surrounded by water, there being a small neck of land between the land northward and the land southward.
3
3 And it came to pass that the Nephites had inhabited the land Bountiful, even from the east unto the west sea, and thus the Nephites in their wisdom, with their guards and their armies, had hemmed in the Lamanites on the south, that thereby they should have no more possession on the north, that they might not overrun the land northward. (Alma 22:32–33)

19 …And in the days of Lib the poisonous serpents were destroyed. Wherefore they did go into the land southward, to hunt food for the people of the land, for the land was covered with animals of the forest. And Lib also himself became a great hunter.
20 And they built a great city by the narrow neck of land, by the place where the sea divides the land.
21 And they did preserve the land southward for a wilderness, to get game. And the whole face of the land northward was covered with inhabitants. (Ether 10:20–21)

Another possibility: Mormon’s culture believing there to be a ‘Narrow Neck’ in North Mexico

In addition to the above reasoning it seems quite likely that ancient Mesoamericans had a different view of their continents geography than we do. A study of ancient maps and geographies shows that modern LDS Scholars have expected too much from ancient Book of Mormon authors by supposing pre-Columbian cultures had a truly advanced modern-like or google earth understanding of continental geography and shorelines. Indeed, although many ancients understood well the spatial relationships for populated lands & cities, or populated places often traveled, the detailed understanding of uninhabited wildernesses and far-off continental shorelines seems to have been very poor anciently. Especially among cultures without widespread use of nautical navigation technology. And our only indication in both the Book of Mormon text and early Colonial accounts is the wide spread use of Mexico’s west coast to travel between central Mexico and North America (perhaps because of contrary currents and frequent hurricanes which were so dangerous and common on the east coast?)

Aztec map, Codex Xolotl showing the spatial relationships of the Valley of Mexico juxtaposed against the Sebastian Munster map (1448-1552): Novae Insulae XXVI Nova Tabula (1540) [Rare 2nd State of first map of the continent of America]. Each are examples of the rudimentary spatial relationships inherent in pre-modern geographers views of the world. See high quality versions here and here.
To see a full catalogue of known Mesoamerican cartographic or map representations read "Mesoamerican Cartography" by Barbara Mundy or "The origins and development of the cartographic tradition in the central Mexican highlands" by Chris Helmke

Our model proposes that much like Sabastian Munster’s early map of the New World (featured above), Book of Mormon authors may have thought there to be another ‘narrow neck’ between the narrow coastal ‘passes’ of Northern Mexico. A misunderstanding likely caused by a belief that the Eastern and Western Sierra Madre mountain ranges were one and the same range. An easy mistake to make given their lack of travel through the nearly impenetrable and uninhabited Mapimi Basin of the Chihuahua Desert. Indeed historical texts show that essentially ALL ancient travel & trade, occurred along the ‘narrow passes’ between the coasts and the steep mountain ranges, with only a few sparsely inhabited mining communities existing in the Deserts of the northern interior.

Book of Mormon Geography
Illustration depicting the actual geography of North America versus what the ancient authors of the Book of Mormon may have thought the geography looked like

A few more examples of ancient maps, and how even among people’s with advanced writing and sea trade, knowledge of coastal geometries was rudimentary. Especially concerning areas where few lived or traveled.

Map of Ariana based on Eratosthenes' data (195 BC) in Strabo's Geography ( 63 BC – c. 24 AD)
Map of Ariana based on Eratosthenes’ data (195 BC) in Strabo’s Geography ( 63 BC – c. 24 AD)
Old antique map of Africa by S. Munster | Sanderus Antique Maps Old antique map of AFRICA showing: AMMON (IN LIBYA) MELLI: Latin- flowing with honey Mono Giant:

Surrounded by Water

Interestingly, the native word for the mexican highland and particularly the narrow highland of west-central mexico or valley of Mexico could actually be related to the concept spoken of in Alma 22:32 where it states, “…and thus the land of Nephi and the land of Zarahemla were nearly surrounded by water, there being a small neck of land between the land northward and the land southward.”

Although often translated as “close to water” or “next to water” and referring solely to the Valley of Mexico, when preceded by ‘Cem’ Ānáhuac is also thought to mean, “surrounded by water”. Cem Ānáhuac is a composed náhuatl name, consisting of the words “cem” (totally) and “Ānáhuac”, in turn a composed word from “atl” (water) and “nahuac”, a location prefix that can also mean “surrounded “. The name can then literally be translated as “land completely surrounded by water “, or “[the] whole of [what is] beside the waters”. See wikipedia links in text above and the Nahuatl dictionary for details.

Codex Quetzalecatzin, in the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology of the Early Americas at the Library of Congress. The map covers an area between Mexico City and Puebla. With Nahuatl stylised graphics and hieroglyphs, it illustrates the family’s genealogy and their descent from Lord-11 Quetzalecatzin, who in 1480, was the major political leader of the region. It is from him the Codex derives one of its many names’. The document dates to between 1570 to 1595 and would have been made by an indigenous painter and scribe. See this link for more codice maps.

Note the words of Eugene Bolten in his book, Spanish exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706. Where he notes it was not until at least 1687 that the Spanish fully prove Baja California was a Peninsula and not an island.

Arriving at his destination in 1687, [Father Kino] at once established the mission of Nuestra Senora de los Dolores… over a hundred miles south of Tucson. This mission was his headquarters for twenty- four years of exploration, missionary work, and writing. several times explored the Gila River; and in an attempt to answer the old question whether Califomia was an island or a peninsula…This inquiry was one of the chief interests of the last eleven years of his life, and, as a result of his explorations, he answered it to his own satisfaction in a treatise, as yet unpublished, I believe, which he called ” Cosmographical Demonstration that Califomia is not an Island but a Peninsula, and that it is continuous with this New Spain, the Gulf of Califomia ending in latitude thirty-five degrees

Spanish exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, Herber Eugene Bolton.

In this same book nearly the exact same language used in the Book of Mormon is used to describe the Baja California Peninsula.

This enterprise failing, [Father Kino] returned to Mexico and secured permission to work on the mainland opposite the Peninsula, [ie. by the narrow neck] which he had visited while in California. His request was that he might work among the Guaymas and Seris, but he was sent to Pimerfa Alta instead. (ibid)

Verse by Verse Analysis To References of the Narrow Neck

The Narrow neck, pass or defensive line mentioned as one of the most prominent geographic features of the Book of Mormon has proved to be incredibly enigmatic.  Far greater than the problems of King James Isaiah, Pauline language parallelisms, anachronistic metals or European animals in the Book of Mormon (which can generally be explained by proposing differing manners of dynamic equivalence translation and channeling processes), the narrow neck problem can almost seem insurmountable. Attempts to correlation the Panama Isthmus with the Book of Mormon gain few supporters for reasons that have been described elsewhere (ref). Perhaps the most supported theory of correlating the Isthmus of Tehuantepec with the Book of Mormon’s “narrow pass” has its own difficulties. Foremost of these is the fact that this model forces both the Nephite and Lamanite lands to be in historical Mayan territories. In these model’s Zarahemla (and the entire Nephite culture) are correlated with mundane Mayan cities which bear essentially no early cultural differences from their surrounding peoples (Lamanites)! Additionally these models require the Jaredites (Olmec) to pass writing to the Lehites (Maya) instead of the other way around as described in the Book of Mormon text. The political and religious dominance of the Epi-olmec and Mexican Highland cultures spanning from the formative to the classic are a far better match (and perhaps the only truly plausible match) with what the Book of Mormon narrative depicts of the Nephite/Lamanite religious and political rivalry..

Reference wording sea west mentioned? sea east mentioned? days jour-ney directional indicators
Alma 22:32–33 “small neck of land” or “the line Bountiful” yes possibly 1.5 from the east to the west sea
Alma 50:34 “the narrow pass” yes separately   by the sea, on the west and on the east
Alma 52:9 “the narrow pass”   no    
Alma 63:5 “the narrow neck” yes no   the west sea
Hel 4:6–7 “the line” yes possibly 1 from the west sea, even unto the east
Mormon 2:29 “the narrow passage”   no    
Mormon 3:5–6 “the narrow pass”   no    
           
Ether 10:20–21 “narrow neck of land” inferred inferred   place where the sea divides the land

Available literature in Joseph Smith’s day clearly called the Isthmus of Panama a “narrow neck” (see here for instance), But also, made clear that its distance was more than the “day” (ref) or “day and a half” (ref) mentioned in the Book of Mormon.  its curious then that if Joseph or some contemporary wrote the Book of Mormon, they would represent the geography SO horribly.    Letter from Balboa dated January 20, 1513. “The Indians state there is another ocean 3 days journey from here… they say the other ocean is very suitable for canoe traveling is always calm…”  (reference here)

This map from 1566 is one of the oldest printed maps of North America. Created by Paolo Forlani, the first edition was published in 1565. This second edition was published by Venetian Bolognino Zaltieri after Forlani sold the plate to him. This is one of the first maps to show the Bering Strait - here called the Strait of Anian. It was an educated guess, as it was not discovered until 1648. The map was bought by the Bartholomew family, who collected antique maps

This map from 1566 is one of the oldest printed maps of North America. Created by Paolo Forlani, the first edition was published in 1565. This is one of the first maps to show the Bering Strait – here called the Strait of Anian. It was an educated guess, as it was not discovered until 1648. Like many ancient maps, the geography is a very rough rendition of the true landscape. High quality version available here.

1569 Camocio Map. Several maps associate tolm or ‘tollan’ with Teguayo. Tolm is generally found in the present-day U.S. Southwest on 1500s-1600s era maps. Several maps, including the 1569 Camocio map, show its full spelling as Tolman, which is likely a variation of the Toltec homeland ‘tollan’. See here and here for a similar but higher quality version.

Map made by Italian Jesuit Giulio Aleni while he was working as a missionary in 1620s China

1620s Wanguo Quantu map, by Giulio Aleni, whose Chinese name (艾儒略) appears in the signature in the last column on the left, above the Jesuit IHS symbol.

1609 Shanhai Yudi Quantu (not by Ricci)

1728 Barreiro Map This is the oldest post-Columbian map which depicts the four migration points of ancient Mexican Indians found in later maps. Some sources also point to this region as a former home for people from Central and South America. See here for an ultra high quality version.

Mexico's huge closed basins (endorheic basins). These large desert regions have no outlet to the sea, and drain internally into large ephemeral lakes and desert playas.

Red outlines show Mexico’s huge closed basins (endorheic basins). These large, sparsely inhabited, desert regions have no outlet to the sea, and drain internally into large ephemeral lakes and desert playas. Settlement and travel through these regions seems to have been extremely rare anciently.

Map available to Joseph Smith in the early 1800's, done by John Carry, in 1811.

Map available to Joseph Smith in the early 1800’s, done by John Carry, in 1811.

SEE SEVERAL MORE HIGH QUALITY EARLY MAPS OF MEXICO AND THE AMERICAS HERE.

MesoAmerican/Mayan influence on Mississippian Culture

from https://www.facebook.com/notes/suppressed-histories-archives/mound-building-in-north-america-is-old/375806979116303/

Recently, claims of Maya migrations to Georgia have gotten a lot of attention. A long-standing pattern interprets North America as a backwater that absorbed influences from Mesoamerica, repeatedly assumed to be more advanced. in “America’s Lost City,” Andrew Lawler lays out a body of archaeological evidence for major mound complexes in Louisiana and Illinois that predate the Maya and even Olmec ceremonial complexes. (Sorry, link does not give the full article: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6063/1618.summary)

 

First, the great ceremonial center of Cahokia was even larger than first imagined. They started excavating East St Louis in a big rush before the building of a bridge and road, and found out that Cahokia extended to that area ten km to its east. It was a vast metropolis, home to tens of thousands of people. They traded extensively with faraway places, and settlements closely linked to Cahokia have been found in places like Trempeauleau, Wisconsin. “As recently as the 1950s, a popular scientific theory touted ancient Mayans rather than Native Americans as the mounds’ creators.” But Lawler says scholars are reevaluating things in the light of evidence that the roots of the mound-building cultures “stretch back even earlier than the grand civilizations of Mesoamerica.” Cahokia itself, if it had been found in the Maya country, “would be a top 10 of all Mesoamerican cities,” in the words of John Clark.

 

It’s well known that the largest mound there equates in footprint to the Great Pyramid, in circumference to the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico. Scholars have authenticated mound alignments with sunrise at solstices and equinoxes. Archaeologists are excavating another ceremonial settlement 64 km to the south of Cahokia, with its own plaza and mounds. They are finding that people came from all over the Midwest to settle here. There were workshops making ornaments from pipestone, red jasper, copper, and other materials. They’ve also investigated why the city collapsed around 1300, with extensive evidence of floods, droughts, and other changes in weather.

The curved rows of mounds at Poverty Point, circa 1400 bceThe curved rows of mounds at Poverty Point, circa 1400 bce

But Cahokia is fairly well known. The more significant information in this article is the demonstration of the antiquity of mound-building cultures in the Mississippi and Ohio river basins. I’ve posted images here before from Poverty Point, Louisiana, which was another ceremonial complex far older than Cahokia. These northern lands of Louisiana are rich in mounds and ancient villages with radiocarbon dates back to the Middle Archaic period “which ended at about 3000 BCE.”  Lawler contextualizes this for us: “That’s nearly 2 millennia before the first cities appeared in Mexico, before the Giza periods, and about the same time that the world’s first major urban centers evolved in ancient Mesopotamia [Iraq]. Most researchers dismissed the dates as erroneous.” Yes, they often do when evidence contradicts their expectations. Archaeologist Joseph Saunders began to study the mounds in northern Louisiana: the six mounds at Hedgepeth, another six at Frenchman’s Bend, along with village remains, and Watson Brake with eleven mounds, and dates going back to 3500 bce. Saunders lays out three major cultural waves of mound-creation. The first emerged in the lower Mississippi valley, 3700-2700 bce. The second, in the same region, centered on Pottery Point, 1600-1000 bce, with a gigantic flying bird mound, 22 m tall and 200m long. It lies atop another set of concentric hemispherical earthworks that covers three hectares, along with other conical and platform mounds. The people here had a vast trade network reaching to the Great Lakes. They made female figurines of clay, carved animals of jasper and other fine stones, and large numbers of bone awls show that they were working leather.

Clay figurines from Poverty Point, LousianaClay figurines from Poverty Point, Lousiana

Even more intriguingly, archaeologists are discovering, “The proportions used at the Louisiana sites closely match those found in Mesoamerica.” They are now considering the possibility that Louisiana may have influenced the Mexican civilization rather than vice versa.  The third period of mound construction started in the early centuries CE, in the Ohio river network of the Adena and “Hopewell” cultures, and culminated with Cahokia, Moundville, Alabama, and other medieval American temple complexes.

 

After the European conquests, many mounds became overgrown and no longer even recognizable as made by humans. “Mostly, the mounds were ignored and then destroyed.” Farmers leveled them, treasure hunters ransacked them, as they did to Spiro Mound in Oklahoma, and cities bulldozed them. The shellmounds in California were similarly destroyed, the burials taken away by the tens of thousands, and still held captive in museums like the Lowie at UC – Berkeley. In Peru, treasure-seekers went so far as to divert streams in the attempt of laying open the adobe pyramids of the Moche. This process of destruction continues today. These historical monuments of immeasurable value are subject to the whims of property owners. The article describes how developers planned to destroy the mounds at Frenchman’s Bend, some of the oldest known, so that they could make a golf course on the site. State and federal law offer no protections for these heritage sites. The archaeologists scramble to talk owners into preserving them, and sometimes even buy up the land to protect the mounds.

 

Update:

I just ran across a reference to dramtic corroborating evidence from Mexican archaeology. Tom Gidwitz in “Cities upon Cities” in Archaeology magazine, Jul/Aug 2010, writes about how new digs in Huastec country “may reveal links between Huasteca settlements and mound-building cultures in the United States.” He continues: “For decades, archaeologists have theorized that North America’s Late Woodland and Mississippian cultures drew inspiration from the Huastecas, but after their excavations at Tamtoc in the 1990s, Dávila and Zaragoza became convinc…ed that cultural influence, and perhaps actual migration, spread from north to south. They unearthed objects that seemed to come from the American Southeast in about AD 900: a fragment of a sheet of hammered copper, a pointed metal hand tool, a piece of engraved shell, a cache of a dozen whole and 20 fragmented Cahokia projectile points, and pottery that could have come from sites to the north such as Etowah [Georgia] and Moundville [Alabama].”I pulled this quote off of a fragmentary jpg on the net. When i track down the article, I’ll post more about it. In the meantime, here are two engraved shells whose stylistic similarity struck me a decade ago. On the right, from the Mound-temple cultures of the Mississippi basin, and on the left, from the Huastecs of eastern Mexico, the very group now being investigated for northern cultural influences. Check out the hatch-marking especially.

 

Right: Mississippi basin; left: Huastec, Veracruz, Mexico.

 

reblogged from http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2012/01/mayan-influence-on-mississippian.html

In this case it is taken as a given that the Mississippian cultures are a cultural conglomerate: MESOAMERICA IS ONE OF THOSE CULTURAL CENTERS WHICH GOES INTO THAT CONGLOMERATE. We already KNOW that the temple mounds come out of Mesoamerican pyramids and are something new and different when they come into the mound area. Similarly, there are other features which seem to be part of that same package that came with the idea of those temple mounds. So going around saying “No Mayas here, HaHaHaHaHa!” does not automatically make the person that says it sound smart. The whole reasoning on that score seems to be that the presumption is absurd. The presumption is NOT absurd, it is already a given that something along those lines MUST have occurred. These cultures do not exist eternally as unchanging packages that evolved locally and never had any outside input from cultures further off. THAT is the absurd pretense. There is no assumption that the temple mounds simply involved in situ from burial mounds: there was a radical change in what the mounds meant and what they were made for.

We are talking about the Yucatan Mayas. It is known as an established fact that these Mayas traded as far as Puerto Rico and that there are many of their characteristic ball courts there. The location in question in Georgia is as far from Yucatan as Puerto Rico is, by direct measure on the map.

Now then, as to The Examiner. I do not know what kind of intellectual elitism is going on here but conceptually there is little difference between a “content farm” and the Wikipedia. IN THEORY the Wikipedia should be better checked and independently confirmed. In actual practice, I have found all too many time I have put quite valid information up on Wikipedia only to see it repeatedly torn down by some know-nothing that has their own pet theory to push, and they can quite obviously fly in the face of published authority and even mathematical proofs if only they are persistent enough. The end result is that anybody in the world can put something up on Wikipedia and the information can bear little relationship to the truth of the matter. So I would say don’t go around looking to ANY one authority, ALL authorities have flaws. Read all you can from every source you can, and don’t take anything anybody ever tells you at face value. I loved my mom dearly, but when I became an adult I found that all through my childhood she had been giving me misinformation that was deliberately meant to warp my views. And there was no malice to it, she simply believed very firmly in certain wrong things and she would drum those wrong things into me.

But actually, if something is true it will be true no matter who should say it, and if a matter is false it will be false no matter who says it. The whole basic concept of a “Reliable source” can be misleading, nobody is ever 100% correct. After a while you will come to know what is a good idea or a bad idea from your own perspective. And I am not about to try to tell you what you should think is right or wrong for you, all I can do is make some suggestions about what sounds right or wrong from MY perspective.

 

The first feature to be noted is that a new ethnic element intrudes into the Mississippi Valley area at the beginning of Mississippian times. They show traits of their cranial anatomy which resemble Mexicans and Mayans more than the Eastern Woodlands tribes and they tend to be somewhat shorter. They also deform their skulls in the same way as the Mayans do. Yes, they are coneheads. At some Mississippian sites it is difficult to find skulls which were NOT deformed in infancy.

The next thing to be noted is that they represent themselves artistically in a manner reminiscent of the Mayans and other South-Mexican cultures, with similar red-pottery figurines:

Now as to the pottery which is allegedly just like Mayan Pottery: That part is true also but it does not begin to tell the whoile story. In fact this is something which has been known for a long time and is one of the key features to understanding the Mississippian cultures. In 1928, Dr. G. C. Valiant published Resemblances in Ceramics of Central and North America, after doing a series of investigations in Mexico for the American Museum of Natural History. He had discovered a series of ceramic traits which he called the “Q Complex” for convenience’s sake. He introduced his subject with these words:

I shall endeavour to call attention to several curious parallels found mainly in the ceramics of Central America and the Southwestern and Southeastern United States That seem to indicate some sort of a relationship, even taking into account the barrier of five hundred kilometers of archaeologically unknown territory…While the Antillean influence on the far southeastern United States is attributable to direct contact[and known settlements over much of Florida-DD]…The traits existing in the pottery of the Western drainage of the Mississippi and to a lesser degree in Tennessee [and adjoining Georgia and Alabama-DD], however, are of a character that indicates a stronger source of infection than a symbolism brought in perhaps by exiles from another land. In short, in the Western Mississippi valley, there exists apparently some sort of action by one culture upon another. These ceramic traits which are quite foreign to the run of the pottery of the eastern states include:

1. Tripod support of vessels.

2.Funnel-necked jars.

3.Double-bodied jars.

4.Rarely, the shoe form of vessel.

5.the high and low form of annular base for vessels.

6. Spout handles

7.the composite silhouette form of bowl.

8. Vessels modeled in the effigy of animals or humans.

9. Vessels with spouts, in plain and in effigy

10. Vessels with the head or features attached

 

And ended with the conclusions that:

It does not seem possible to explain away such parallels as these by independent invention of styles since the basis of the ceramic development of the Eastern United States does not seem to contain the germs for this Western Mississippi [ie. Mississippian-DD] complex. Nor from this same lack of transitional steps is it probable that the styles developed there and moved South. Yet to what epoch and to what culture in Central America, on the other hand, do these forms relate?

As an inexplicable residue among the ceramics of Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador and Costa Rica, occur such traits as composite silhouette, decoration by incision [Mississippian example below-DD], support of vessels by legs or cylinders, spouted vessels, pot stands and effigy forms. These elements obtain under such conditions of antiquity as beneath the volcanic ash of Salvador, under the Old Empire Maya remains at Homul and Uaxactun, and are associated with pre-Maya material at the Finca Arevalo in Guatemala. [the traits are also present down to Peru and absent over much of Mexico, Vaillant recounts]…Doctor Lothrop and this writer designated these elements as influence Q, since we know neither their center of distribution nor their makers. This complex occupies in Central America a position analogous to the relation between the primitive cultures in the Valley of Mexico and the Toltec and Aztec cultures.

In other words, we are not only talking Mayan ceramics, we are talking old, basic traditional Mayan ceramics. Something that the country people would remember when their elite rulers had been taken away, and pottery traits which would not have been transmitted by way of Northern Mexico primarily.

As I had mentioned before, the Mississippian houses were built according to the usual Mayan plan. To be frank, these are nothing like the wigwams common in the eastern United States, they are tropical huts.

The high steep-sided roofs are designed to shed heavy tropical rainfall and designs much like this are common in Northern South America and also in Indonesia (They are also used to indicate the possibility of TransPacific diffusion between those other two regions, along with use of the BLOWGUN, which the Mayas also had. The duplication of blowgun technology on both sides of the Pacific is something that is hard for non-diffusionists to explain)

And then of course the most obvious and characteristic feature of the Mississippian cultures is the creation and use of the stepped-pyramid temple mounds, built along parallel principles but using earth instead of stone as the construction material. And this came with a version of Mesoamerican pyramid ceremonialism, placement around a plaza,human sacrifice, headhunting and veneration of human skulls.

And besides building pyramids after a design similar to the Mayan pyramids at Chichen Itza, the people carried a name by which they seem to have called themselves, Itsas. a hundred years ago or more, this was not even questioned, it was taken for granted that these people had come from that part of the Yucatan and that is why they were using that name.

POSTSCRIPT

I had begun to develop a very long and involved followup to this article on linguistics, making very involved and complicated arguments, but then I saw how the situation could be represented most easily. In the Wikipedia entry discussing the validity or non-validity of the so-called Amerind linguistic superfamily, a long list of languages is included. I excerpt part of the listing here:

Penutian–Hokan

  1. Penutian
  2. Gulf
  3. Atakapa
  4. Chitimacha
  5. Muskogean
  6. Natchez
  7. Tunica
  8. Yukian
  9. Mexican Penutian
  10. Huave
  11. Mayan
  12. Mixe–Zoque
  13. Totonac

IN OTHER WORDS THE MAYAN AND GULF LINGUISTIC FAMILIES ARE ALREADY CONSIDERED ADJACENT AND RELATED LINGUISTIC GROUPS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerind_languages


Clay figurines discovered on the Mann Hopewell Site show faces with slanted eyes, which were not a Hopewell feature. Some believe the figurines show a connection between Indiana and Central or South America.

 

Olmec-like Hopewell figure-ens found at Mann Site in Indianna. Other long distance trade goods, like obsidian from Yellowstone and Grizzly Bear teeth from the Rockies were found.

“It’s like Vegas … for archaeologists,” says Mike Linderman, who manages state historic sites in western Indiana. Linderman says the Mann Hopewell Site is bigger than its more famous Hopewell counterparts in Ohio, and it’s filled with even more exotic materials, like obsidian glass that has been traced to the Yellowstone Valley in Wyoming, and grizzly bear incisor teeth.

“Grizzly bears obviously are not from Indiana, never have been,” Linderman says. “There’s a theory out there now that instead of being trade items, these items [were] actually being collected by the people from Mann Site on rite-of-passage trips they [were] taking out to the West. You know, it’s something big if you’ve killed a grizzly bear and you can bring its teeth back to Indiana.”

Jaguars and panthers aren’t from Indiana, either, but they show up at the Mann Hopewell Site as beautifully detailed carvings. Put them together with clay figurines that have slanted eyes — not a Hopewell feature — and Linderman says we could be looking at a connection between Indiana and Central or South America.

https://www.npr.org/2011/01/03/132412112/the-prehistoric-treasure-in-the-fields-of-indiana?ft=1&f=1008


Exotic artifacts found at Tamtoc on Mexico’s East Coast

Perhaps the best evidence of north south trade between Mesoamerica and the Eastern United States were a serious of articacts found in Tamtoc, Mexico.

From http://www.huasteca.tomgidwitz.com/html/tamtoc.html  (published in the magazine Archaeology dated to 2010)

 

The results may reveal links between Huasteca settlements and mound building cultures in the United States. For decades, archaeologists have theorized that North America’s Late Woodland and Mississippian cultures drew inspiration from the Huasteca, but Davila and Zaragoza’s excavations at Tamtoc in the 1990s convinced them that cultural influence, and perhaps actual migration, spread from north to south. They unearthed objects that seemed to come from the American Southeast in about A.D. 900—a fragment of a sheet of hammered copper, a pointed metal hand tool, a piece of engraved shell, a cache of a dozen whole and twenty fragmented Cahokia projectile points, and pottery that could have come from sites to the north such as Etowah, and Moundville. When they dug into a terrace beside the site’s western mound, they found that, like the mounds at Cahokia, it had been piled up layer-by-layer in basket-sized loads, with dirt from pits that became the lagoons around the site.

“We dug and dug and dug,” says Davila, “but I understood nothing.” Then he read Garcilaso de la Vega’s La Florida del Inca, an account of the 1539 Hernando de Soto expedition to the Southeast. It describes huge Indian trade and war canoes that plied the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the rivers of the Southeast. “We think there was a migration by sea,” says Davila.

Scholars have long recognized that both the Southeast and Huasteca had towns with artificial lagoons and platform mounds with thatched structures on top, engraved shell jewelry, imagery of feathered dancers, stone pipes, and ghostly pots that represent the dead with closed eyes, open mouths, and filed teeth. They have theorized that the cultural influence flowed from Mesoamerica northward, but the Tamtoc artifacts, other mounds in the Huasteca, and the region’s incised shell gorgets, post-date their earliest North American counterparts.

University of South Florida archaeologist Nancy White says that major cultural influences, as well as people, may well have traveled north to south. “We know other things may have moved from North to South America, things that may be considered less important or equally important, like tobacco.” The Mississippian motifs of the Late Prehistoric period that appear in the Huasteca do indicate that “at this late time people were probably moving around and sharing these ideas, but just a few things.” In the field, Martínez and Córdova want to see for themselves.

Physical anthropologist Carlos Karam has taken bite molds of about thirty contemporary Teenek and is comparing the inherited contours of their molars and bicuspids to Tamtoc skeletons and to ancient and modern Maya. He’s checking the DNA of modern Teenek against that of ancient Tamtoc skeletons; strontium isotopes in Tamtoc teeth, absorbed in telltale amounts from drinking water, might reveal where the city’s dead grew up.

“This is a hypothesis we are testing, and we have not found enough information to confirm it, yet,” Córdova says. Martínez and Córdova think it will take ten years to complete their excavations. But just as important to them is making Tamtoc into an instructive oasis in this disrupted landscape. They plan to stock the restored lagoons with fish, reestablish the fruit trees that once thrived here, and demonstrate how ancient Tamtoc sustained itself. This year they will begin construction on a site museum and teaching center where local students will work side by side with archaeologists, study artifact restoration and conservation, and learn about indigenous people.

 


 it is certain that people in what is now the American Southwest had extensive contacts with Mexico that would have had to included contact with Aztec, and perhaps Mayan cultures. There are trade items that have been found in both locations. We know the many of the trails and routes that the trade took place over. We don’t know if single individuals traveled the whole distance or it went form middleman to middleman, but there was contact for a long time and thus they would have known about the civilizations to the south. All the trade was carried out by people walking and carrying the goods on their backs. There was no currency, mail, stores, set prices, or banks. All trade was face to face and always would have involved negotiation. With that, as in all places that trade in this way, comes information and stories. There was no way to buy anything anonymously. Information always travels on trade routes. A person or group of people arriving form a distant culture with valuable goods would be big news every time it happened.

As Ben said, Chocolate and turquoise are some of the best evidence. But that was not all. These areas in the SW were large trading centers that connected big part of the continent in a pansouthwest trade network. It stretched to the Pacific in southern California, to the Gulf of California, north to the mobile Plains people and the sedentary plains people like the Mandan and Pawnee, east to the Gulf of Mexico, and far south to Aztec lands. Some of the items traded were: domestic turkeys, corn (maize), squash and beans, copper bells, pottery, shells of many sorts, obsidian, parrots and feathers, cotton textiles, tallow, buffalo meat, malchite, pedernal chert, lead, sillimanite, leather goods, and much more were traded.

Shells from the Pacific have been found in Mississippian mound building culture sites. Some olivella shells and abalone found at the Caddoan Mississippian site at Spiro in eastern Oklahoma originated on the Pacific coast. These would have had to have been brought by trails from the Pacific to Zuni, to Taos and then to people that brought them to Spiro. Spiro was a major western outpost of Mississippian culture, which dominated the Mississippi Valley and its tributaries for centuries. Because they were in contact with people who knew about the Aztecs it is likely they know about them too.

Here is a diagram/map of routes that pacific shells were carried by people form one culture area to the next in the SW and Southern California. All these areas were in turn connected to Aztec areas to the south and to peoples on the Plains and Mississippian peoples.

The evidence of chocolate in vessels as far north in Pueblo cultures as Utah and Colorado shows it was regularly consumed. But it was not just the cocoa beans that were traded. The way to make them into a drink was also learned and the shapes of special pottery vessels to prepare that drink was brought from the south to the American SW. Culture, technology, and information moved north. With that information would have come knowledge of large cities to the south.

Because the closest place Chocolate can be grow is south of the Aztec capital and all trade went through there, it is all but certain they knew about the Aztecs. It is possible that they traded with people on the Pacific coast but those people were in close contact with the Aztec. Turquoise that can be chemically traced from the SW is found in Maya areas.

It is I think important to remember what kind of scale the Aztec civilization was. It is also important to remember that today’s borders are random and meaningless in a historical sense. Because people were trading with the Aztecs, it is to me simply ludicrous to imagine they did not know about the Aztecs. It was definitely something people would talk about.

The main center of the Aztec empire, that controlled both the empire and managed tributary states, was a city on an island with causeways on a lake. The main market had about 20,000 people in it on regular days and 40,000 of festivals. Cortez estimated 60,000. There were 45 major public buildings. Some of the temples were 200 feet high and 262 by 328 feet at the base. The palace had 100 rooms. The most common estimate is that 212,500 people were living there on 5.2 sq mi. The Empire was multi-ethnic, multi-lingual realm stretched for more than 80,000 square miles through many parts of what is now central and southern Mexico. At least 15 million people lived in it. They lived in thirty-eight provinces.

Now think about any random human’s behavior. If you lived 1,500 miles north of Mexica and traders came every year from that huge city for hundreds of years and you sent things back there, how would it be possible not to know about it? Some people would also go south on the trails just out of normal human curiosity. There were not armed or walled borders.

Another big connection between the SW and at least as far south as the Aztecs are the ritual ball courts. They are found as far north as the Wupatki area outside of Flagstaff. It was started there in 1100CE abandoned at Wupatki in 1250 CE. It is 1,600 miles to Mexico city today. And even further on the trails that would have been used. They might have got the concept from the Hohokam, but some person or groups of people had to either seen the courts in Aztec areas or moved from those areas. It could not have come just as a word of mouth story, it is too complex and too similar. At that location, shells, salt, and cotton, copper and turquoise were traded. All those items were coming from or going to, far to the south and to the west.

The earliest Hohokam culture appears in the southwest around 300CE. About 600 CE the archaeological data shows the contact between the Hohokam and the civilizations of Mexico intensified. The southern most Hohokam style courts are in the Santa Cruz river in northern Mexico which flows north to the Tucson area. This marks the beginning of what archaeologists call the Colonial Period. Imports from the civilizations in Mexico at this time include lost wax cast copper bells, macaws (which are valued for their feathers). Pyrite mirrors from Mesoamerica, traded to the Hohokam have mesoamerican art on them. The pyrite mirrors were made from a round disk of schist on which were glued thin sheets of pyrite (a reflective metallic mineral often called fool’s gold), were traded from the Valley of Mexico. Hohokam also used other Mesoamerican food plants such as agave and amaranth as well as corn, beans and squash.

Hohokam communities built ball courts between 700 and 1100 C.E. In the Phoenix Basin, the Hohokam had some 70,000 acres under cultivation with their elaborate networks of irrigation canals. About 80,000 people lived in the Hohokam culture area. Some of the ball courts were 250 feet (76 meters) in length and 90 feet (27 meters) in width. In some instances they were dug up to 9 feet (nearly 3 meters) into the subsoil. There are at least 220 ballcourts at 181 sites across Arizona. There were probably more that were have not found and were built over.

All the rubber balls used there needed to be traded and carried on someone’s back from south in Mexico. Whether a Hohokam person did the trip or an Aztec trading caste member the people using the balls would have know they came from a far away culture to the south. It is thought that rubber balls, a cacao, and feathers, and seeds and other things came north in exchange for turquoises and obsidian and for cotton textiles. This was a regular trade, so over the centuries people in the American SW would end up with considerable knowledge of Aztec places even if they personally never went there.

Archaeologists have found rubber balls similar to those used in Mesoamerica at sites in the Southwest. The rubber had to have come from southern Mexico. It does not grow further north. The balls were made by mixing the Panama rubber tree latex with a sap from a morning glory species. This adds sulfur to vulcanize it. It is only found as far north as southern Mexico. The balls for most of the versions of the game were 3–4 inches in diameter. But there was also a version with a bigger ball hit with the hip (8 inches).

I don’t think anyone knows if items went person to person and tribal territory to territory or if some class of people did the whole length of the routes. There were many many routes and contacts over great distance however. And the current barrier of the Mexico border was not a cultural or political line. It is hard for people to think about sometimes but it only exists from 1848 onward. There was no reason to stop at that line in the past.

Pueblo people in historic times did round trips from Zuni to the Gulf of California. That is well over 600 miles to the southwest over difficult terrain. They also had routes to the Pacific, but I think those were not done by Zuni themselves but by middlemen.

There also is the well known existence of the Aztec professional long distance trader class called Pochteca (the singular is pochtecatl). To some, the people they used to carry the goods seem a lot like the images of Kokopelli that are found throughout the SW. They were high status in the Aztec world and traveled beyond the empire. They carried information and spied too. They probably are the way corn and other crops moved north into the SW. Their patron god also has a pack. These traders were certainly the ones that came north for turquoise. They don’t seem to have just used middlemen. A special subclass the Pochteca Naualoztomeca, the ‘disguised merchants’, did long distance trade seeking after rare goods. Long distance trade began long before the Aztecs from Mesoamerica in the Formative period (2500–900BCE). There was a complex system of trading centers and laws and judges that controlled the trade. The market in the north of Mexico city, called Azcapotzalco, was the one that was a trading hub and controlled all major markets and trade routes.

Long distance traders in Maya communities were called Ppolom. The Olmec had a similar caste too. The Yucatec Maya traded along the coast with large canoes with other Maya groups as well as with Caribbean communities who in turn traded to the American SE. The Ppolom were long-distance traders who usually came from noble families and leaded trading expeditions to acquire valuable raw materials. Their seagoing trade routes went from the Gulf of Honduras to Veracruz Mexico. There are also indications of contact, most likely by coastal boats, between Mesoamerican cultures and ones on the American SE Gulf coast. It is not really far by water. The boats that were described by Columbus’s brother had 25 paddlers and also passengers and piles of goods. They were 2.5 meters wide and had a small thatched shelter in the middle. It was after capturing one that they first saw cacao which was a currency in their trade. They would have mostly likely traded with the Aztecs in the Veracruz area which was a mixing place between the tow cultures. The Aztec trading class then took the cacao to the American SW as far north as Colorado and Utah in the Four Corners region.

This is the god of the Aztec trading class and below is a trader.

There is some other evidence on long distance travel. When Cabeza de Vaca finally made his way from Galveston TX through the southwest and then south to finally be able to find the Spanish a bit north of Culiacan, Mexico (Nov 1528-Jan 1536), it is certain that he was traveling on established trading routes. And when he went with the Spanish back to Mexico City from Jan to June they were traveling on established trails as well. They had not built roads and they did not go aimlessly overland.

People did go and know about things at great distances. When Euro-Americans first encountered northern Plains peoples they had high status blankets from Navajo and Pueblo weavers. They would have traded for them in Taos or Zuni. That was over 700 miles to the NE.

The Navajo stories migration of some of the clans have a pretty clear account of traveling from the Pacific near Santa Barbara all the way to near Farmington NM area. You could follow the path today. It is over 900 miles. Whether the clans really moved that way or not, it is clear that some people had traveled that distance.