Tall el-Hammam is a large ruin mound on the eastern side of the Jordan Valley, about nine miles northeast of the Dead Sea in Jordan. In the Middle Bronze Age it was the center of a substantial city-state, with heavy mudbrick ramparts, a palace and a temple, and its upper levels end in a thick layer of ash, burned brick and debris. Excavators date that destruction to about 1650 BC and report that the city was then largely abandoned for centuries. Those facts are not in dispute. What destroyed the city, and what the site has to do with the biblical Sodom, are.
What happened
Since the mid-2000s the site has been dug by an expedition under the archaeologist Steven Collins, of Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Collins has argued for years that Tall el-Hammam is Sodom, based on his reading of Genesis 13, which places the cities of the plain in the well-watered Jordan Valley. The identification has met resistance even among evangelical scholars. As Christianity Today reported in 2014, the pottery in the destruction layer dates to about 1650 to 1600 BC, centuries later than the date conventional biblical chronology gives for Sodom’s fall, and some critics argue that other passages put Sodom near the southern end of the Dead Sea. Collins does not accept that early biblical chronology.
In September 2021 the journal Scientific Reports published a long paper by 21 authors, led by Ted Bunch and including Allen West of the Comet Research Group, the geologist James Kennett and Phillip Silvia of Trinity Southwest University. It argued that the city had been destroyed by a cosmic airburst larger than the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia. The authors pointed to melted pottery and mudbrick, shocked quartz, tiny spherules and diamond-like carbon in the destruction layer, along with shattered human remains. They also suggested a salty blast had poisoned the surrounding fields, leaving the region empty for centuries, and that an oral memory of the event might have become the Genesis story of fire and brimstone. Press coverage was enormous, and the paper was accessed hundreds of thousands of times.
The investigation
Problems emerged almost immediately. The scientific-integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik flagged on PubPeer that many photographs in the paper appeared to have been altered. In February 2022 the authors published a correction acknowledging that dozens of figure panels had been edited to remove measuring tapes, old labels, fingers and other items, which they accepted was an inappropriate level of manipulation, and supplied the originals.
The science came under fire too. In March 2022 the impact geologists Steven Jaret and Scott Harris argued in the same journal that the paper did not meet the established criteria for identifying shock-metamorphosed quartz, and that melted ceramics and slag mean little at an archaeological site whose inhabitants had kilns and metal workshops. In 2023 the journal added an editor’s note saying it was examining concerns, and the authors corrected their description of a computer simulation by the physicist Mark Boslough, which they had presented as a model of Tunguska although it showed a much larger event.
The retraction
On April 22, 2025 Boslough and Andy Bruno published a further critique showing that the paper’s picture of Tunguska was built on exaggerated secondhand sources, including an inflated count of flattened trees. Two days later Scientific Reports retracted the article, saying the editors no longer had confidence in its conclusions. Eleven authors disagreed with the retraction, and the corresponding author, Allen West, told Retraction Watch the team would republish with new data.
Where it stands
The destruction of Tall el-Hammam around 1650 BC is real, and its cause is open again. The airburst explanation has lost its main peer-reviewed support without being formally disproven, and its authors say they intend to make the case again. Whether the city was Sodom is a separate question that depends on how one reads Genesis and its chronology, and most scholars, believers included, remain unconvinced.