About Us

In 2009 Warren sailed as a crew member on the Phoenicia Expedition, a 600 BC design wooden sailing ship from Aden, Yemen to Salalah in Oman. See the project website and photo gallery at www.phoenicia.org.uk. He then led a team of nine persons including a botanist, an archaeologist and a film crew to the prime Bountiful site. Several significant discoveries were made, including smeltable iron ore traces at the site itself.

Bountiful Tours is a non-profit entity managed by best-selling author and speaker Warren Aston. Warren is the only Latter-day Saint who has explored the entire eastern coast of Arabia and many inland areas that Lehi and his family must have passed through, Warren discovered that only one location has all the features that Nephi described when he wrote about “Bountiful.” In 1993 he led two BYU-funded expeditions to the site which is now the subject of long-term research projects by BYU and a TV documentary and IMAX movie now being filmed. Warren’s award-winning book reporting the research, In the Footsteps of Lehi, was published by Deseret Book in 1994. Papers and articles by Warren have been published by FARMS at BYU since 1984 (see his material on the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship site under “Authors“) and he has lectured on his findings at BYU Provo and at Cambridge University in England.

More recently, Warren and two associates discovered two altars in Yemen dating to 600-700 BC that bear the Book of Mormon place-name “Nahom,” the place where Ishmael was buried (1 Nephi 16:34). Described by historian Terryl Givens as the “first actual archaeological evidence supporting the historicity of the Book of Mormon,” the altar find was featured in the February 2001 issue of the Ensign. Warren continues to conduct Book of Mormon research in Arabia and in Central America.