John L. Sorenson
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Introduction
Born and raised in a small community in northern
Utah, his schooling in electrical engineering at Utah
State was interrupted by World War II. Trained as a
weather forecaster in the U.S. Army Air Corps. (M.S.,
California Institute of Technology), he served in the
South Atlantic theater. Following an LDS mission to
the Cook Islands, he changed to the field of
archaeology and anthropology (M.A., archaeology,
BYU, 1952). After field work in southern Mexico, he
attended UCLA where he received the Ph.D. in
(social) anthropology in 1961, while still maintaining
an interest in Mesoamerican archaeology.
He initiated the academic program in anthropology at
BYU when he joined the faculty there in 1958 and
headed it for a total of 14 years. One of his major
interests at that time was ethnographic studies of
modern Mormon populations. With his interest turned
to modern day problems in applied anthropology, he joined General
Research Corporation in Santa Barbara, Cal., from 1964 as their chief
social scientist. In 1969 he returned to Provo where he founded
Bonneville Research, a subsidiary of General Research (doing social
science studies). He returned to the BYU faculty two years later. A health
problem in 1985 led him to retire the next year from BYU and from his
position as chair of the Anthropology Department.
Subsequently he devoted much attention to his early interest,
Mesoamerican anthropology, with emphasis on documenting evidences of
diffusion between the Old World and Mesoamerica and of the relationship
of Book of Mormon peoples to Mesoamerican civilization. Among his
significant publications are An Ancient American Setting for the Book of
Mormon (1985), World Trade and Biological Exchange before 1492 (with
Carl L. Johannessen, 2009), and Mormon's Codex (2012).
He and his wife Kathryn reared nine children. After her death in 1991 he
married Helen Christianson, mother of nine. They live in Provo, Utah.