From the Archives: A team of anthropologists argues that flawed research linking biblical Sodom to an archaeological site led to media hype that harms science and encourages illegal excavations.
For myriad reasons, and like many other scholars working in Southwest Asia, we were profoundly disappointed when Scientific Reports, a peer-reviewed journal operating under one of the world’s leading scientific journals, Nature, published pseudoscientific research about a supposed ancient cosmic airburst destroying the Tall el-Hammam site in what is today Jordan.
A leading scientist on asteroid collisions and airbursts, physicist Mark Boslough took to Twitter to deconstruct line-by-line the scientific errors in the paper. After scrutinizing the images used in the publication, Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant, concluded: “Several photos of the dig sites appear to contain cloned parts, small areas that appear to be visible multiple times within the same photo.
For Steven Collins, the project director at Tall el-Hammam, and his team, the exercise of proving Tall el-Hammam is Sodom is the entire point of the endeavor. The goal of the work focuses resolutely on identifying Sodom, so it appears that all of the interpretation, communication, and fundraising of their work bends to meet that objective.
The age of archaeologists carrying a Bible in one hand and a spade in the other should rest in the past, buried in the colonizing archaeological practices of the 19th and 20th centuries. Today numerous rigorously scientific archaeological ventures investigate biblical time periods, yet none state they conduct their research to prove biblical stories as fact.
As anthropological archaeologists and critical thinkers, especially about heritage resources, we aren’t interested in equating real sites with mythical biblical cities. While the authors of the Scientific Reports article assert that the issue of whether Tall el-Hammam is the biblical city of Sodom “is beyond the scope of this investigation,” mentioning Sodom multiple times and speculating about the connection produces insidious results.
Buyers have explained their motivations for acquiring these objects by saying, I want “something from the time of Jesus,” “something related to the Bible,” or “a pot from the city of sin” .
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