On our home page we have a Face Book link to Phil Silvia who has been taking part in excavations at Tall el-Hammam in the Kikkar region of Jordan (the plain at the northern end of the Dead Sea). This is thought to be a contender for Biblical Sodom as it displays evidence of a catastrophic destruction. This is not to say sodomy has anything to do with the demise as that appears to be a later embellishment, a means of explaining the ruins in a later era. This coming season Phil Silvia will be specifically looking for evidence of the manner of its destruction. He will be doing sample gathering across the eastern side of the Kikkar (until next March) and these will be analysed in a laboratory in due course. The idea is to get a fix on the nature of the event that wiped out the cities of the Plain. Something hot and dramatic terminated the Middle Bronze age levels in the Kikkar. In years gone by the site would have been catalogued solely as destroyed and historians and archaeologists would have put this down to conquest by a foreign army, earthquake, or any of a number of other possibilities. Nowadays, archaeologists can apply a much more scientific approach to destruction levels, teasing out information from the soil. In other words, if there is evidence of destruction from the sky (a meteor exploding in the atmosphere above the Kikkar) that evidence may still be around.
Having the facebook link (you need to sign up to join) visitors to the web site will be able to be on hand to find out prior to publication elsewhere that something important has been discovered- or not. The link is on the Home Page in the Activities box.