Article Title

Deer as “Goat” and Pre-Columbian Domesticate

Authors

Matthew Roper

Keywords

Book of Mormon, United States, deer, Mesoamerica

Abstract

Sometime after the death of his father Jacob, Enos wrote that the Nephites raised “flocks of herds, and flocks of all manner of cattle of every kind, and goats, and wild goats” (Enos 1:21). While contemporary archaeology thus far has not yielded evidence of pre-Columbian goats, anthropologist John L. Sorenson has suggested that Book of Mormon peoples, like the Spanish writers of a later time, may have considered some species of pre-Columbian deer to be a kind of goat.

Recommended Citation

Roper, Matthew (2006) "Deer as “Goat” and Pre-Columbian Domesticate," Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship: Vol. 26: No. 6, Article 3.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/insights/vol26/iss6/3