Whether critics of the LDS faith know it or not, John L.
Sorenson’s work on transoceanic voyaging in pre-Columbian times has
garnered considerable respect among at least some non-LDS scholars. His
publications on the subject span across six decades, and appear in a variety of
peer-reviewed and academic publications, such as El México Antigo, New England Antiquities Research
Association Newsletter, Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian
Contacts (published by the University of Texas Press), Contact and
Exchange in the Ancient World (published by the University of Hawai’i), and
Sino-Platonic Papers (published by the University of Pennsylvania).
He has co-published
a 2-volume annotated bibliography of the literature on pre-Columbian
contacts, which received some positive reviews. He also co-wrote (with a
non-Mormon scholar) World Trade and Biological Exchange before 1492, detailing
all the biological evidence for transoceanic contact before Columbus. In a letter thanking
Sorenson for a copy of this work, Michael D. Coe declared, “So much of this
evidence, I think, is irrefutable.”
With the above in
mind, I thought it was worthwhile to point out that a heretofore unpublished book
by Sorenson, called Transoceanic
Voyaging: How Ancient America Became Civilized (2013) is available in
Book of Mormon Central’s archive. Here, Sorenson attempts to use the evidence he
has compiled in his previous work (namely, World Trade and Biological
Exchange before 1492) to reconstruct a history of transoceanic contacts
between the Old and New Worlds.
The conclusions
reached are bound to be controversial, and I am not necessarily endorsing all
of Sorenson’s views. But given Sorenson’s status as one of the leading scholars
on pre-Columbian contacts, it is bound to contribute to the conversation in some
important ways. I thus thought it worth drawing attention to this little known
item in the Book of Mormon Central archive.
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