The Book of Mormon is the primary source of our work. We believe that it is a “most correct book” and should stand on its own merits without additional interpolations and extraneous interjections or forming assumptions beyond the scriptural account. The following is our analysis of structures Lehi’s descendants actually built, as described by the record keepers, and our response to assumptions commonly put forth about these Book of Mormon buildings. Unfortunately, the often-turbulent Nephite history (600 B.C. to A.D. 421), even though mostly chronological in the Book of Mormon account, is not uniformly represented. For example, the pages in the books of Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, and Third Nephi represent some 200 years, or approximately one-fifth of the Nephite history. Yet this short time occupies nearly two-thirds, or 319 of the total of 531 pages in the Book of Mormon. As a result, fewer details of structures are recorded from the first 400 years when the Nephites were settled in the land of Nephi and the last 400 years when they were primarily located in the northern lands of Bountiful and Desolation and farther north. The loss of the 116 pages of Mormon’s abridgment of the Book of Lehi (see the heading to Doctrine and Covenants 10), which spanned the first 400 years of the Nephite history in the land of Nephi, presumably denies us more details than provided by the less-secular small plates of Nephi covering the same time (First Nephi to Omni). Likewise the Book of Fourth Nephi records nearly 300 years of the history in only four pages and, understandably, with almost no descriptions of structures.

In this analysis we outline the types of structures, their scale and size, their construction materials, the times of construction and their locations within the Book of Mormon lands. We include temples, synagogues, houses, towers and every other type of structure. All of this is intended to help answer a simple but essential question: If you saw a Nephite building, what should you expect to find?

• Temples
• Synagogues
• Palaces
• Towers
• Highways and Roads
• Prisons
• Tents
• Additional Structures
• Cement
• Freestanding Walls
• Tools and Machinery