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!

Excavating at Tall el-Hammam:

Back in late January/early February, I had the opportunity to dig as a volunteer on the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project (TeHEP), an archaeological excavation at Tall el-Hammam in Jordan. I haven't gotten around to writing about it until now because I've been recovering from two weeks of rewarding but hard work (bookended by some seriously fatiguing travel and followed by immediately getting back to work), but I'm finally ready to sort through the pile of photos I took and compose my thoughts. This'll hopefully be the start of a post series of indeterminate number as I work my way through various aspects of the trip.

For starters, this was actually my third time digging at Tall el-Hammam, but the previous times I went were in 2007 and 2008, a full two years before I began this blog. (Apparently I mentioned it once, several years ago.) Since then, life got in the way and I never had time or money (or both) to go again, despite enjoying it quite a lot. In the intervening years some of my siblings went, and this year my mother wanted to go for the first time after hearing all of our stories, and suggested we could make it a family outing. Which is how I ended up on an archaeological dig in Jordan with my mom, my two brothers, and several of their friends who decided to come along as well (in addition to other volunteers and the actual professional archaeologists running the project – it wasn't just us!).

To set the stage, Tall el-Hammam, the site we were excavating, is located near the edge of the Jordan river flood plain to the north of the Dead Sea (though it does precious little flooding these days, as nearly all of its water is used for irrigation before it reaches the Dead Sea). One nice aspect of this particular dig project is that the diggers have never really had to “rough it” in regards to lodging. In fact, the three years I've been we stayed at the 5-star Mövenpick Dead Sea Resort (though there was a multi-year period of staying at other hotels in between, and this was the first time back there in something like a decade). So here I am at the shore of the Dead Sea the day after I arrived, at the lowest point on the Earth's surface:

I'll be somewhat circumspect when it comes to writing about the dig itself, because it's an academic endeavor and I don't want to accidentally scoop any publications arising out of it. (Some people have earned their PhDs from work on this project.) The Jordanian Department of Antiquities, under whose auspices the dig goes forward, also frowns on too much sharing on social media, so while I can show photos of the dig, I'll have to be intentionally a bit vague about the specifics of stuff uncovered this season.

The Dead Sea can be quite pretty, despite the name. You can see Israel on the other side.

This year I went for the first two weeks of the eight-week dig, which was a first for me (in the past I went a bit later in the season), and had its pros and cons. On the one hand, we had to clean up the site for excavation after two years off for the pandemic, which meant we really didn't do much actual excavation the first week (or even some of the second). On the other hand, we got to be the first to discover things that later-comers would get to see exhumed from the dirt, and that's always an incredible feeling. 

Anyway, this post is mostly an introduction to the series, so look forward to more to come. In addition to the dig itself us diggers got to go on a few “field trips” to various places (including Petra), so I'll have some more tourist-y photos too. A hui hou!