Why excavate at Tall el-Hammam?

After my first post on the subject of excavating Tall el-Hammam, the question of “why” might reasonably arise. To which there are (at least) two answers, a general and a specific one. The general answer might be to reply with, “Why do any sort of pure research with no immediate practical application?” I find archaeology interesting (if a little too dirty and outdoorsy to make a career out of), there's so much we don't know about the past, and it's an incredibly exciting feeling to be the first person to spot the beginning of something odd poking out of the dirt. (Which happened to me a few times this trip.)

The specific answer is that if there's a better candidate for the city of Sodom out there, we haven't found it yet. That's not to say the site was only Sodom; there were several multiple distinct occupation phases, from the Chalcolithic to the Roman period, which were separated enough in time that they probably had different names. (For instance, it may have been [part of] the city of Livias during the Roman period.) We've yet to find a sign with any city name (or any kind of written record – disappointing, but by far the most likely outcome for an excavation), so the identification of the site as Sodom comes down to a few factors: the right place, the right time, the right (relative) size, and (as dramatically revealed over the course of the latest excavation) the right kind of destruction event. I'll tackle these in order, but there's a fair bit to go over.

Tall el-Hammam (from the bus, excuse the reflections–it's difficult to photograph due to its humongous size. This is actually just the upper tall, there's a large, flat, mostly round lower tall off to the left.

A lot of the information here comes from memory of various talks and other interactions with Dr. Steven Collins, the dig director and the person who first (in modern times) identified the site as Sodom. He was struck by the fact that most modern identifications of sites for Sodom and Gomorrah where in the wrong place and the wrong time – south of the Dead Sea (or “sunk beneath its waves”), and of sites that were abandoned centuries before the Cities of the Plain (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim) described in Genesis were destroyed.

Tackling first the question of location: based on the reported geography in Genesis, the Cities of the Plain cannot have been south of the Dead Sea; they must have been to its north. (Collins like to point out with amusement that there's actually more information about the geographic location of Sodom than any other city in the Bible, if you know what to look for.) As a first clue, Abraham is reported to be able to look out to where they were destroyed from his camp between Bethel and Ai, which were a bit north of Jerusalem and northwest of the Dead Sea. This immediately removes the south of the Dead Sea from consideration, since you can't see there from that location. And for the 19th and 20th century scholars who basically shrugged their shoulders and decided the cities had sunk beneath its waves, modern science shows that the Dead Sea has only shrunk since the time of Abraham, so there can't be any “lost cities” conveniently hidden away down there.

The “plain” in Cities of the Plain (“kikkar”) is actually not primarily a geographical term, but has as its root idea the concept of “roundness;” it's also used of coins, and flat round bread (think pita in the Middle East, tortillas in the Americas). The term used translates to something like “the kikkar of the Jordan,” and looking at a map it's not hard to see how the Jordan flood plain just north of the Dead Sea makes a round-ish plain. (Genesis also describes the kikkar as “well watered [before its destruction]…like the land of Egypt,” which would fit the flood plain nature of the area – even today it's where most of Jordan's agriculture happens.)  Abraham could easily see the entire plain from where he was camping, but definitely couldn't see to the south of the Dead Sea. So the Cities of the Plain must be located somewhere in that area.

The Jordan flood plain north of the Dead Sea, with Tall el-Hammam circled, just south of the (modern) Kafrein reservoir, which dams the waters of the wadi that would've provided water to the city.

Now, the question of time: when were the cities destroyed? The general scholarly consensus is that Abraham and the other patriarchs lived in the Middle Bronze age; specifically, around 1900–1800 BC. This helps rule out other sites that have been put forward for Sodom and Gomorrah, like Bab-edh-Dhra and Numeira, which were abandoned already in the Early Bronze age, hundreds of years too early. (Also, they're south of the Dead Sea.)

So Collins went looking for cities in the Jordan flood plain, present at least in the Middle Bronze age, and found some, with Tall el-Hammam being by far the largest. And not merely in its local neighborhood, but as the excavation has proceeded, it's been discovered to be the largest site in the southern Levant for hundreds of years, from the Chalcolithic period to the Middle Bronze age, when it was destroyed and not resettled for some five to six hundred years (almost skipping the Late Bronze age entirely, with settlement only into the Iron Age). Based on how the Cities of the Plain are described in the Bible (Sodom appears on its own, then “Sodom and Gomorrah”, then “Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim”), it seems probably that Sodom was the largest, with a satellite city of Gomorrah, followed by Admah with a satellite cities (or cities, the -iim is plural in Hebrew), so Tall el-Hammam was identified as Sodom, with three nearby talls (Tall Kufrein, Tall Nimrein, and Talls Mustah & Bleibel) that showed the same pattern of destruction being identified as the other three cities.

A close-up of the region with Tall el-Hamma (lower right) and Tall Khufrein (upper left) outlined. Tall el-Hammam is considerably larger, and was the largest site in the southern Levant prior to its destruction in the Middle Bronze age.

Tall Khufrein (Gomorrah?), seen from atop Tall el-Hammam. (The hill in between looks like another archaeological site, but is private land and has never been excavated.)

Now, when we talk about destruction, it's important to remember that cities in the ancient world get destroyed all the time. A city being destroyed is hardly news, and on its own, says little. However, because cities get destroyed so often, archaeologists have a pretty good picture of the various ways it usually happens: to earthquake, or fire (perhaps caused by earthquake), or war (or more nebulous causes like climate change or people just sort of abandoning it).

Prior to the current excavation beginning in 2006, a previous excavation of Tall eh-Hammam had noted an occupation gap, termed (perhaps informally, I'm not sure) the “Late Bronze gap.” In practice, this gap means basically no one occupied the site for around five or six centuries after its destruction in the Middle Bronze. That is somewhat odd, because it's a fantastic site for a city in the old world: on a defensible hill, on the Jordan floodplain with great agricultural opportunities, with a spring for fresh water and a wadi nearby, at the confluence of the trade routes running north-south and east-west (all of which helps explain why it was so large and prosperous for so long). Often when cities are destroyed in the ancient world, people come and rebuild them basically immediately – brush the collapsed stone off the foundations, clean up a bit, and build right back. (That or the city becomes permanently uninhabited – breaks happen, but not usually for five hundred years, on prime real estate.)

As mentioned, the other sites identified as the remaining cities of the plain show the same destruction in the Middle Bronze with either no resettlement throughout the Late Bronze age, or ever. Interestingly, even Jericho, across the Jordan river on the other side of the flood plain, shows signs of destruction around this time, though with a much shorter or non-existent gap in resettlement. This is hardly conclusive evidence, but it's certainly odd: what would keep people away from the best real estate in the southern Levant for so long? And after sixteen seasons of excavation, a picture has started to emerge, of a destruction so overwhelming and unusual that people may simply have avoided the area out of fear (and also, possibly, cropland getting salted to a level which would've prevented growing various cereal crops – we'll get to that later).

What was that destruction? Some seventeen lines of evidence all point towards it being something like a Tunguska-sized airburst event, but this post is getting long enough as it is, so it'll get a post of its own. A hui hou!

Visiting the aftermath of Kīlauea's 2018 eruption

Back on Easter Sunday, I drove about an hour to the south of Hilo to visit the Kapoho area. Specifically, I wanted to see Kapoho crater, which I'd read contained one of the few lakes on the island prior to the 2018 Kīlauea eruption, which filled it in with lava. On the way there, I realized the road I was driving on was built on top of the lava flow from that eruption, which was quite a thrill. It feels like just yesterday I was hearing about it (the year after I left Hawaii for Australia), but of course it's coming up on five years now – just a few days to go.

I didn't manage to get any great photos of Kapoho crater due to scattered clouds coming in and ruining the light, but this panorama from the east side isn't too bad. The lava flowed around and into the crater (leaving a kīpuka) on the side towards the camera. I wish I'd known about (and been able to visit) the lake before it was evaporated away, but I'll have to settle for this. The green of the wooded slopes of the crater walls is certainly quite vibrant against the dark lava surrounding it!

Kapoho crater with its new (solidified) lava lake.

On my way back from the crater, I realized I was passing close to both Puna Geothermal Venture (the sole geothermal power plant on the island) and Fissure 8 itself, the main source of this lava. The lava flowed all around the power plant, covering a few outlying buildings and geothermal wells, but ultimately didn't destroy it. The road leading to it from the highway wasn't so lucky, however, so their new front entrance runs directly across the cooled lava flow that nearly destroyed the plant (as seen in the photo below). Talk about a cool commute to work!

The approach road to Puna Geothermal Venture (to the right). Kapoho crater is (barely) visible in the distance.

Following the lava flow to its source, I found the (in)famous Fissure 8, which erupted in the middle of Leilani Estates, a rural housing development. You can see some of the nearby houses in the photo below, along with a wisp of steam still rising from the general area.

Fissure 8, source of some of the most destructive flows from the 2018 Kīlauea eruption.

I was, as mentioned, living off-island when the eruption happened, and wasn't familiar with the area beforehand, so this was my first time actually seeing the results up close. It's an interesting (and stark) reminder that 90% of Kīlauea's surface area is less than a thousand years old, and that it continues to be one of the worlds's most active volcanoes. Life's never boring living on a volcano in the Pacific! It's nice to be able to explore from a new aerial perspective, as well.

One final photo: a panorama showing Fissure 8 (or ʻAhuʻailāʻau) on the left, the lava flow from it in the middle, and Puna Geothermal all the way over on the right. The sheer scale of the area covered by the flow is awe-inspiring, and flying over it definitely gave me an appreciation for how huge an area was covered.

Fissue 8 (left) and Puna Geothermal (in the distance, right)

And there's still a lot more land area that was covered, and new land that was created! The area's not that hard to reach, so I might head back some time and try to get some more photos of different areas. I've been waiting for the wintry weather here to subside a bit, in hopes of less chance of rain and wind, and it seems like it's finally starting to turn, so I might be able to do some more drone flying before too long. I'd really like to get back up to where the flow from Mauna Loa covered the access road again, this time without the wind nearly knocking me over with each gust. But that's for another post. A hui hou!