Originally published at: Biblical city of Sodom was likely destroyed by an asteroid | Boing Boing
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You don’t get your own special on The History Channel by slogging through years of field work and peer review.
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Somewhat relevant to this story
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I believe Netflix is the home of ‘alternative’ archaeology these days. Collins and Graham Hancock can probably collaborate on another brain-deadeningly ‘documentary’.
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Here is a physicist dropping an air-burst on the ‘research’:
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Not wanting to doubt the credibility of this ‘discovery’, but… trinitite is only formed in a nuclear explosion.
The term for rocks created by impacts is - and sorry, us geologists aren’t very imaginative - ‘impactites’. If the rock is glassy then it is - and again, don’t judge us for lacking inspiration - ‘impact glass’. The most famous of which being Libyan desert glass which is a gorgeous translucent yellowy-green glass found across parts of North Africa and believed to date from about 30 million years ago:
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Good find. An unaccredited Christian university excavating in the Middle East and publishing in an open access publication - yeah, that’s all my alarms going off.
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No. No it was not. And spreading pseudoscience like this does actual, real world harm, @pesco
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As an archaeologist working with pottery this sentence alone destroys any credibility of a story with me
They’re pottery sherds, not shards.
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An asteroid sent by God to destroy the city.
The Bible is still right.
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Finally, some pedantry that is relevant!!
(Seriously, it makes a nice change.)
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Wait so, a la Chuck Tingle, it was Pounded in the Ass by an Asteroid?
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That’s the issue. The archaeologists are starting from the conviction that Tell el-Hamman is Sodom, and they want to prove it to prove the truth of the Bible.
From the article posted by @Doctor_Faustus
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 team produces a high-profile, lucrative, clickbait storyline that they can deploy in a wide range of scholarly and public-facing venues. In the 2007 Wall Street Journal article “Digging for Sin City, Christians Toil in Jordan Desert,” Collins asserts that Tall el-Hammam is “ground zero for wickedness” and that the site would one day be a “a great tourist destination with a great big sign, ‘Welcome to Sodom,’ perhaps in pink neon.”
This WSJ article describes volunteers paying thousands of dollars to participate in the dig and notes that fundraising efforts appealed to fears of a post-Christian world. Collins states that he sought to verify biblical stories to challenge the “insidious little vermin of gnawing doubt about the credibility of the Bible. Christianity is lost in Europe because it lost faith in the biblical text. Post-Christian America is very, very close.”
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I up my skepticism to the max for any research connected to a religion’s holy documents because of how crap most of it is.
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This is the same bullshit I read in Velikovsky books as a teenager. No, nobody found trinitite in the Middle East, as there have been no surface atomic blasts in the Middle East. Impact glass is something different, like Moldavite, but if it’s coating pottery, then it is almost certainly a primitive glaze, fired in a kiln. With wildly off-base “evidence” like this, I have to conclude that the rest of his “evidence” is equally specious.
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Okay, now explain how Abraham and Lot knew in advance. 
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ZOMG! There’s a glassy substance coating this pottery! It must be from a nuke or a meteor strike! There’s no other reasonable explanation for a glassy coating on pottery!
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Since when has the Babble been right about anything?
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God sent them a text.
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