#16 Uncovering the Lost City of Sodom with Dr. Steven Collins

It's just the only stone they knew that would burn was sulfur from Yahweh out of the heavens. Were you nervous about landmines? There is no surviving objective history from antiquity. Why would you turn that down? Today we're going to talk with Dr. Steven Collins. This guy has been excavating the lost city of Sodom for about 20 to 25 years, a total of 16 dig seasons. He's going to show us evidence of pottery that's been heated up to over 8,000 degrees and turns green into what's called trinitite and how that can only be done three ways. Lightning, a meteor, or nuclear. He shows us that all of the stuff in the ground was blown from a southwest to a northeast direction, indicating a blast. When you look at the pottery, it's burned on one side, melted on one side, and and not very burned on the other, indicating it was some sort of air burst instead of like lava that melted. It would just totally destroy it. The total destruction matrix is about 1 and a half to 2 m thick about 6 ft and everything in this this site has looks like it was put into a blender and just shuffled up. He takes us through images. We held pottery. The amount of proof that he has in to me is beyond contestation. But what I really loved about talking with Dr. Collins is that he both knows why he thinks it is the way it is and he knows all the detractors. He really tries to steal man their their narratives and then tries to poke holes in it. And I think he does. And he presents what I think is one of the most compelling cases for finding the lost city of Sodom. It matches up with biblical texts and it match matches up with extra biblical texts. And we're going to go into all of that. So, I hope you really enjoy it. If you like ancient archaeology, if you like biblical history, this one's for you. Welcome to the Austin and Matt podcast. >> What was one of the most impactful moments where you knew that you had found Sodom? Well, I knew I'd found Sodom based on the geographical research. I mean, I read the Bible. I went to Genesis chapter 13. That's the road map. And people have said, 'Oh, you discovered Sodom. Well, kind of. I mean, if somebody shoved a map of California in front of me and I used it to find Los Angeles, I could not be attributed with finding or discovering Los Angeles. >> Why? Because somebody gave me a map and I didn't really have to do much. Same thing. I happened to pay attention to the biblical text. And when we paid attention to the biblical text, what we wound up finding was a place that was in the right time frame that the Bible demands for that city. It's in the right lo geographical location. And when we got into the soil in the excavation, we found all the right stuff, including evidence that it was literally blown away by a fiery cataclysm that came out of the sky, exactly as Genesis 19 describes. How far away was it from where the mainstream had said that it was? >> The mainstream, if you look at a if you look at a map of that area, you have the Dead Sea. Most people put Sodom toward the south end of the Dead Sea. And they did that for a very good reason. They took their brain out of gear. I mean, they just went click. You know, logic and reason just flew out the window. If you read the text, you can't go anywhere but north and east of the Dead Sea. That's where the Bible puts it. And and besides that, what they forgot to u they forgot to connect up was the time of Abraham is actually post 1800 BC. It's after 1800 BC. We can talk about some why the reasons for that. But if you look at the sites that are in the southern Dead Sea area, they all went belly up 500 years at least before Abraham was ever born. There's nothing down there archaeologically that could associate with the time of Abraham. period. End of story. >> And so what was one of the what was the first thing? So the scripture says where it is and then you go over there and how did what's the first sort of thing you see that verifies that for you? >> Well, once we had triangulated around all the geographical indicators in the text and there's I'll tell you exactly 24 there are 24 geographical indicators in the biblical text for the location of Sodom. By the way, what's number two on the list? The number two identified site in the Bible is Jerusalem. It has 16 indicators. So, it ought to be way easier to find Sodom than it is to find Jerusalem. And so, uh, we did that and we found it. So, how did we know it was there? Because it's a gigantic mound. It is the it had already been referred to as the largest archaeological site in the entire Jordan Valley. Now, why didn't anybody know about that? because it was stuffed in a book in a country Jordan that a lot of people don't pay attention to archaeologically. Everybody pays attention to what's going on in Israel archaeologically, but Jordan kind of takes a backseat to that and nobody really paid attention to it. Not to mention the fact that the area where Tal Ham or where Sodom is located is highly strategic in antiquity and in modern times. There was a military site dug into and placed on the site that is Tal Al Hamam, the site of Sodom. And so the whole western part of that was landmine during the latter part of the 60s and early 70s back six- day war, Yam Kapur war, all of that. So it was strategic in antiquity. It's strategic now. And so, you know, a little matter of landmines kept people from coming and doing excavation in the area. In fact, K Prague from the University of Manchester actually excavated a site to the south of Tal Hamam, which we now know is one of the satellites of the ancient citystate of Sodom. And um she did a little excavation over on the far west end of Tal Ham. Just kind of sent a team over there for a couple of days while one of her workers lost a foot to a landmine. They packed up and boogied where you never left. And nobody ever put foot, nobody ever touched Tal Hamom until, and that was in the late 1980s, early 90s. Nobody touched it again until we walked onto the site uh in about 2000. >> Were you nervous about landmines? >> Honestly, no. Because I knew nothing about it. >> You didn't know to be worried? >> No. I had no clue. I mean, I as I look back on it, I have to go, >> well, we we maybe we dodged a bullet. Um, when we first went up on the site, we took a team, left, four of us, uh, my wife and I, and and two friends of ours, and, um, because we had gone over there just to check out the theory that we had gotten from the Bible in terms of its location. So, we're we're on the ground checking all this out and we're walking all over the site, you know, we're going in and through the bushes and the banana fields and we're everywhere all over the site. And um we didn't know anything about landmines, never heard anything about landmines. And um and then over the year, the next five years as I we worked on getting a permit uh to start the excavation, we had teams of 20, 50 people over the site going everywhere picking up shirts, surface shirts, you know, look looking at stuff, which is what you do in sort of the pre-exavation phase. You want to see what the ceramics tell you. And that's so I have everybody gather it up, bring it to us, and we look at it. we we read the pottery. It's my expertise. And um so uh we had people doing that. Well, then years later, even while we're excavating, I think in the first two two or three years of excavation, we're excavating and we get the and we get these government officials that come down handing out t-shirts and pamphlets on landmines. >> No way. just to remind people that they had swept the area back in the mid 90s >> and they pretty sure it was clean, >> but they still would find a stray one now and again. So, they were doing a little promo with the local people and they would do this periodically. That's the first time I'd seen it and I'm going, "Wait a minute. You're telling me there are landmines out here and the Department of Antiquities has given us a permit? You know, why didn't they say anything about it? Nobody said anything about it, but thankfully nothing ever happened. So I figured, you know, the military uh mind sweepers came through in the mid '9s and pretty much cleaned up the Jordan Valley and and Tal Hamom and um whatever they didn't get, the sheep and the goats got, you know, >> you know, everyone every once in a while there'll be a little uh little mans on the hoof, you know. Uh, so anyway, it was clean and we never had a problem thankfully. >> So you get this permit and what does it mean your first dig? What how big is it? How big of a hole do you dig? And what what happens? >> Is a big site. It's not one of these little small sites because we're surrounded by dozens of archaeological sites. They're all within the sphere of Talam. They're all part of the citystate. But Talam is the is the urban core of a massive citystate. We now know it archaeologically as the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the entire southern Levant, which would include Israel and Jordan. And so it's big, it's prominent, it's it's a it's such a big deal that we now get asked pretty routinely to to write chapters or write things for other people's publications because they have to include it or they would be remiss. Of course, they would be if they don't take into account this very very important site. So, um, it was it was important and it was and it really bothered me, by the way, that I couldn't find the name of it in other literature outside the Bible. If this was such a big deal, it was a big place, and it was, why is the Bible the only literature that mentions it? >> Yeah. How many people do you think were living in the Sodom? Uh, I guess what would you call it? Like, it's not an empire, but it's a >> It's a city state. It's a city state. >> It's a city state. It occupied probably controlled the uh the agricultural region of about 400 square kilometers. >> Okay. >> So it's pretty good size. >> Yeah. >> Uh it had hegemony over a lot of smaller towns, even walled towns. And so there there are five major towns within its sphere with large with larger towns at at a farther distance but lots of hamlets and villages and small towns around it. So it we now know it is probably the most um the most concentrated population center in that part of the world. I mean it's re there's really a lot of people living on that piece of real estate. We estimate it when you add it all up. And by the way, there is a formula for how many people in antiquity you can cram into an acre, >> okay? >> Or a hectare. Um 2.4 acres to the hectare. Um so so if you have a a a 70 80 90 100 um acre site and you can cram in 100 to 150 people per, then what does that tell you? you have 10,000 people, 15,000 people. Um, so we basically did some computations and added it all up, estimated that the the contiguous population of the land of the Kar, and this is what the Bible calls it. The word Kar means the circular aluvial plane of the Jordan Valley on the east side of the Jordan River. Um, so that area had somewhere between 40 and 60,000 residents. That's what we estimate is >> could be a little more. I mean, there's always the better one of people yet that you can't that don't live in cities that are hanging out in the area that you can't see because they're living in tents. So, um, but we estimate let's just say 50,000 on the on the round figure. It's a lot of people. And when I when I think of the story of Sodom, people always mention Gomorrah. Did you find Gomorrah or is it part of that same citystate? Well, when we did our theoretical map, of course, we had Sodom and Gomorra there. There's in that story, there's three dublets. There's Bethl Eye. That's where Lot started out. That's 12 miles north of Jerusalem up on the plateau uh to the to the west of the valley of this location. Um so, it's Bethloni. Then there's Sodom Gomorrah. That's two sites. And by the way, the one that's mentioned first logically and in and antiquity the mental construct there is the biggest one is mentioned first. The big one then the smaller one. So Bethl eye which is the bigger one Bethl but it's a formula with the biggest one always mentioned up front. Sodom Gomorrah the big site is Sodom. Gomorrah is a smaller town in tow. Uh then there's Adma, Zebuim. Adma, bigger town. Zeboim the smaller town. But it's always Sodom, Gomorrah, Adma, Zabuim in that order. Well, which one's the biggest of all? Sodom is the anchor town and all the others are in um in the gravity of the bigger town. And so we found Did we find Gamora? Well, we started out with nothing when we had our theoretical map based on the Bible. We knew where they should be. But when we got on the ground and actually started looking at the archaeological sites that were available in the region um as as candidate sites, we wound up with about five times more sites than we than we needed. All of a sudden, we just thought we were barely going to squeak it out. there'd be Sodom and there would be Gomorrah, couple of sites and then a little bit further away the other double Adma and and Zeboim. So that's not what we got. We got those, but we got a bunch of other ones because the Sodom citystate was laid out in dramatic fashion with guardian cities all around it. Sodom in the middle and purposefully putting cities around it. So you could not get to Sodom without going between two guardian towns that probably had military outposts as well. And so it's very very well protected. In 16 seasons of excavation, we never found one sentella of evidence for a military capture of that city. No military action on that city. Why? Well, for two reasons. Number one, uh, it's 500 ft below sea level. It's in the it's in the one of the hottest places you'll ever want to be. And so the time of going to war in antiquity was always in the spring. You get your winter planning in planting in, then you head out to go kill people. You know, it's their Super Bowl. And, you know, every city, every town, every culture had an annual Super Bowl event, which was to go out and kill somebody. And so, you just do it. So the time the time of the going to war says that in the Bible the time of the going to of going to war is the springtime. Get your winter planning in. Get everything ready and get your city fixed from the winter rains and then okay what do we do now? Oh, who are we going to kill this year? Oh yeah, let's go there. So people go out and go to war. Well, if you go fight against Sodom and the cities of the plain, you come down into the valley in April, May, it's already over 100 degrees every day. You get into June and July, it's 110, 120. And so if you're going to put if you're going to lay siege to a city and the city has hot and cold running water inside the city which Sodom did has still today it has good springs inside the city and you're outside and they got lots of food and and you're just in bivwack encamped around the city. Who's going to last longer? >> The people in the city. >> The people in this city are going to last way longer than you are out there roasting your brains out. And they've got these big uh buildings with walls that are mud brick walls which are very good insulation, a meter thick, two, three meters thick. Um they're cool. And uh so so the king of Sodom is just up there sitting on his palace veranda drinking his iced tea and and just watching whatever's going on around him. They're happy and fine. No military force ever got to Sodom. They never laid siege and were successful ever. According to the archaeology, we're not talking about texts here. Talking about what the actual history of the site says. We have two earthquake destructions after which they immediately rebuild. But two earthquakes, no military destruction. Not a single not a single weapon could we find. Oh, maybe a stray uh arrow here or a stray axe head over there, but those probably belong to the local residents, not not to a military campaign. How far down do you have to dig to get to these sites? >> Well, on the lower city, the city has a big spread on the lower city. It's about 3/4 half to 3/4 of a kilometer across. So, it's pretty good size. It's big. Um, as I said, the site is around somewhere between 62 even up to 70 80 acres now because we lost a lot of it to the to the wash out on the Wadi side to the north. So a lot of collapse and erosion o over millennia but um it's so it's really big and um when you have that sort of size then um you probably have two cities one tucked inside the other. You have a lower city and you have upper city and they're both at Talam they're both separately defended. There's a massive fortification built around the lower city. There's a separate and equally massive fortification built around the upper city. >> And these are buried or like is there >> like when you first walked up >> is there two feet of dirt or is there >> It all depends. >> Okay. >> The upper city is at our site is very different from the lower city. The lower city a after it was d obliterated by this catastrophic event toward the end of the middle bronze age somewhere around 1700 BC. Um, nobody ever built over the top of it on the lower city. Well, you know, there there is a a Hellenistic Byzantine uh u bath house in one sector, but it's just that building. Uh you can wherever you walk on the lower city, you're walking on the moment of destruction. You can see the tops of the buildings. The stone foundations are showing. You can walk the city wall. It's visible on the surface. And so literally as soon as we start excavating on the lower city, we're in the middle of Bronze Age from the get-go. >> Like one shovel in >> one, you're walking on it. You're literally walking on the on the tops of the stone foundations of that time frame. >> How did you choose where to dig first? And how how >> That's a good one. Well, let me explain the upper city first. Yeah, >> the upper city is a different ball of wax because 700 years after it was destroyed in the middle bronze age and by the way this is the best watered agricultural landscape in the region. So why did it take 700 years? Why did it go offline in 1700 BC and nobody lived in this area? There was no settlement in this area till about a,000 BC. >> And that's verified not just in biblical texts but external uh societies, right? They this place was not lived in for 700 years. >> Yeah, that's the archaeology of the area. >> And it has ge but it has the geographical high ground or advantage. This is this is where you would want to live because it's proximity to the Jordan. It's proximity. >> Exactly. And >> why wouldn't people live there for >> it's a strong point, but it's even stronger if you understand the archaeology of the whole region. The southern Levant sites that is I'm talking about Israel Jordan in the toward the end of the early Bronze Age about 2500 BC. Right in that time frame, all of the cities and towns in the southern Levant went belly up. This was climate change at its worst for them. It stopped raining. We know that because the level of the Dead Sea dropped like a rock. It went from historic high to historic low in about a 150year period. >> How can you tell that >> in the archaeology? >> Yeah. um cores, mud cores, Dead Sea cores up and down the Jordan Valley doing core cing and looking at Dead Sea caves. When the Dead Sea is high, it floods into the caves. It deposits carbon material. Uh and that carbon material in those cave deposits can be radiocarbon dated. So there's a very very detailed paleoclimatological study, a research set for all of this. It's very well studied. Yeah, it's very mainstream. >> Got it. >> So, the Dead Sea >> fluctuates 100 to 150 m >> to historic high to historic low. That's a lot. >> 300 450 ft. >> Yeah. Bottom to top. >> It's going up and down all the time. >> In fact, almost never. And I tell people this, some people get disappointed, but the Bible map that you see or the the area of of the Dead Sea that you see on a map, it almost never looks like that in antiquity because right if you look at it, you have this big northern space on the top and then you have this tongue like Lissan, that's what it means, Lassan or Lissan Peninsula in the middle. Then you have a a southern basin. You have deep northern basin, a little tongue-like feature dividing it, and then the bottom you have this little shallow basin at at the toward the south. And um when the rain stops or the when the rain slows down, the southern basin dries up quick. It's only a few feet deep. The northern basin's over, thousand feet deep. >> So it's really, really deep. And so it never goes away. But when the rain stop all the the moisture, all the rainfall, the water feeding into it from both sides of the rift, all that go pretty much stops and the water just drops like crazy. The evaporation, it's the surface of the Dead Sea today is 1300 feet below sea level. It's hot. It's like taking Albuquerque or even Los Cusus to the south of here. Uh you know, here at Albuquerque, look how hot it is today. It's going to be 100° today. We're above. We're a mile high right here. Right where we sit. We're a mile high. Look how hot it is outside. So, take this location, same latitude as as the Dead Sea, almost exactly, and shove it 1300 feet below below sea level. >> Yeah. >> How hot is that? It's really hot. And the evaporation is tremendous. >> So, so at 2250 BC there was a drought >> basically. 2500 >> 2500 BC >> going in from about 2600 down to 20 by 2500 everybody was out of business the all the towns and cities were abandoned dead except one >> Tal Ham >> Talam the citystate Talam didn't even hiccup >> because it's they have the Jordan River >> right there >> they the entire Trans Jordan aquifer groundwater the the springs underneath were disorgging in that area they still do today. Still have water running across the roads everywhere because the the spring water just comes right out of the mountains. And so they, in fact, the Bible says, this area was watered like Egypt. Go read Genesis 13. This area was watered like Egypt. Well, how did Egypt grow its crops? They didn't need rain, >> springs. >> It was the annual inundations of the Nile. And that's what drove Nyloic civilization for 3,000 years. Well, the Bible says that this Jordan that this Kar land of the Kar was watered like Egypt. That is the Jordan River annually in it's kind of a Nile and miniature. It would overflow its banks and deposit silt and they would plant their crops in the newly deposited wet silt and that allowed them to survive without rainfall. But this great Trans Jordan aquifer was constantly disgorgging. So they could use irrigation techniques to put water into their fields from springs that were all over that area. They didn't need rainfall. And so when everybody went belly up, they thrived. In fact, from 2500 BC down to about 2,000 BC, this area actually grew. It actually gained in population because other people whose towns had gone out of business were looking for a place to land and a lot of them came there. And so what's interesting here here's the interesting thing about all this. When everybody else in the southern Levant went belly up, Talam, the citystate there and all the towns around it continued to thrive uninterrupted. Okay, put that in your head. But in 1700 BC when the reigns after the reigns had been back for a good while after Canaanite civilization at all these sites that had gone belly up were now up and running again and thriving at a time when everybody in the southern Levant was thriving at the height of what we call the Canaanite civilization. Tall Ham and all of its neighbors went belly up. >> And this is this is >> what does that tell you? >> Yeah, it's written about everywhere. This is not uh controversial to say that. >> No, it's not controversial. This is the archaeology is cut and dried here. It's very clear. When nobody else when everybody else went down, Tal Hamom survived. When nobody else went down, Talam and all of its cities were taken out in a heartbeat. No, less than a heartbeat by a fiery cataclysm. cataclysm uh with evidences in the archaeology of thousands and thousands and thousands of degrees Fahrenheit hotter than anything that could be produced terrestrially. >> Volcanic magma you only need about 18 1,800 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit is what you get when when magma's coming out of the middle of the earth. We have we have pottery melted at Tamom and bricks melted and other melt products that are done at four and five times that heat index. Thousands of degrees, not just a couple of thousand degrees. >> What what what in nature makes that 8,000 6 to 8,000 degrees? >> Well, I mean you could do it with lightning. >> Lightning and what else? >> Uh the only thing you can after that you only have one choice. you have some you have some kind of impact event. >> Okay. >> So, meteorite uh made of a like comet fragment, a big snowball, dirty snowball. Um not dissimilar to what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Uh that's kind of that was a global event. We're talking about a localized event here, but something like Tunguska, Siberia, 1908. So some kind of impact, but there's also a kind of impact that doesn't produce a crater because the object actually burns up in the atmosphere. So it's coming in at tens of thousands of miles an hour depending upon the speed. Now we have velocity, we have trajectory through the atmosphere and we have the mass of the object itself. Depending upon all those things, it may survive the atmosphere, the burning in the atmosphere and impact and leave a crater. But sometimes these things will go um from solid to liquid to gas to plasma. Just vaporize. And when that happens, it doesn't leave a crater. It just toasts everything on the ground really badly. And this happened Tangusa, Siberia, 1908. 2500 square kilometers of Siberian forest toasted in the blink of an eye. What happened? No crater. But when scientists finally began to study that and still study that area, they find what we call microproxies that are generally only produced by impact vents. Things like microsphererals of iron and silica. Uh shocked quartz, grains of quartz that are pressure fractured. Um because the uh you know the barometer goes up quite a bit. Quite a bit pops. It would just pop. You know, today I the pressure is so so great. Um, and of course heat uh and we get melted stuff whatever was there uh at the right moment uh in the right condition aimed in the right direction uh facing the the heat pulse would would melt. And so you find all these kinds of indicators and not only that but minologic indicators like high concentration of platinum, a platinum spike, other kinds of you know iridium, osmium, rare earth elements that get deposited by meteoritic strikes or air bursts that do not normally appear at all or in any uh any abundance in the earth. natural. >> And were those things in at Tal Helom? Talam. >> Yeah. The layer at Tal Hamom, the middle bronze age destruction layer, which is a meter to a meter and a half thick across the site, has all of these proxies. Every proxy known to an air burst or an impact event is found in that layer. Not above and not below. Let me say it again. Not above. Not in the Iron Age layers above. Not in the intermediate or early bronze age layers below but only in the stratum represented by the destruction of Tal Hamomam about 1700 BC. In that layer we get it all. 21 so far 21 different microproxies of air bursts. Now I know there are people out there handful of people out there screaming oh no it's not an air burst. Oh the you know the researchers are wrong. By the way, the the guy who's the biggest screamer against this, I'm not going to mention his name because frankly he gives himself uh he gives himself enough press him, you know, you know, he's very enamored with his idea that he's the only person in the world uh who can properly assess an air burst event. um not other astrophysicists or other people with equal degrees or equal academic credentials, but just him. So um um so I'm not going to mention his name. He has enough arrogance in in his own head. Um but he tries to trash us and trash the AR. Oh, these things are common. These things appear all. No, they don't. No, they don't. And by the way, he's not an archaeologist. I am um I spent my last 35 years in the ground. I understand I know how to I know the difference between a garden variety destruction mil you know like military earthquake destruction other kinds of destruction. I know what those look like. By the way, I wrote the proxy. I was the first p archaeologist in the world to write proper proxy lists for various kinds of destructions that nobody ever studied d their destruction layers. You know, they make some sort of a macro um comment on it. Oh yeah, look at we have several centimeters of ash here. This must be a military destruction or we have some earthquake damage. Maybe it's an earthquake. We have some fires. That's all they say. Nobody. We were the first excavation in the history of the planet to do detailed indepth micro investigation into what's actually in that destruction layer. And it's not a few centimeters of destruction. It's a meter to a meter and a half of destruction. that that destruction layer was named by one of our field supervisors because once he started looking at it and excavating through it, he said, "I'm calling this the quiz art effect." Because literally that meter of destruction looks like somebody took a city and threw it into a quizart and hit the button. >> It got blended. It's just it is ground up pulverized bone, human and animal, pottery, fragments of everything you can imagine. Just all the everyday stuff churned up and through the full thickness of the matrix. In the palace area, for example, we hardly found anything sitting in C2 and broken in C2. that is sitting where it was in in a living context. No stuff is broken, strewn in a clear southwest to northeast direction across the site with things like we have like a 400 kilo grinding stone that's you know cut a little bit over a meter long. It's about a half a meter thick. has a nice grinding surface and it we call it a saddle kern because you literally throw your leg over it and sit on it and grind on it, right? Grind grind grain on it. Well, this saddle kern is is rolled off its base and it's it's in the palace kitchen. By the way, how big is the Sodom Palace? I think this is really cool. Like we're not talking small potatoes here. The Sodom Palace kitchen is 500 square meters. >> 1500 square feet. >> Whoa. >> That's 5,000 ft. >> 5,000 square feet. Yeah. >> Whoa. >> It's just the kitchen. >> That's the kitchen. >> So, at least a dozen, probably 20 ovens. I mean, it's it's it's full of storage jars, all kinds of stuff. We'll we'll look at some of them. >> Yeah, you have pictures. I'd like to get into some of the details. >> And um so it's uh well, you know, we'll just scroll through here in a second. Yeah, great. >> Just kind of take you through, but this um this palace has almost nothing on the floor. We find Do we find lots of P? We find bits and pieces of over probably almost 2,000 different vessels, but very few of them are already connected with the floor. They're broken and they're up in the matrix. We found one cooking pot, smashed in about a thousand pieces. We still haven't got it all together yet. 50 cm off the floor, smashed up against a plaster wall, southwest facing wall. This thing's moving southwest and northeast. And it's up in the matrix and it's smashed against the wall, not the floor. So, how does this happen? Here's what we know having looked at this matrix and studied this matrix for now almost 20 years, 16 field seasons. I mean, we spent years in the field um and examining all this on the macro level and the micro level. This entire one meter of destruction debris was at a moment in time. This is absolutely a fact, absolutely provable. And a lot of publications that we have coming out now uh in our final publication reports are just going to blow people's minds because and there's it, by the way, it's not to refu it's not to prove or refute. It is what it is. If we walk out this door and we look at the concrete on the on the sidewalk and we look at the asphalt on the on the driveway, do we have to prove that? >> No. >> No, it just is what it is. It's so plain as the nose on your face. You don't have to prove it to anybody. Now, we will publish all of this, but it's not going to be, oh, it could be this or it could be that or maybe there's a different interpretation of it. No, no, it's too obvious. Everything that is deposited in this matrix was at one moment in time airborne, pulverized and airborne and for about that long and then it just slumped into place. And so that's the kind of matrix we have. And we can prove it. Bones, pieces, bones of individuals. And that's a little bit more difficult situation to put those back together. But pieces of pottery, painted pieces of pottery that you find in this square over here in this trench in one year at one level and you find other pieces of it in different squares at different levels in the same matrix. Some at the bottom of the matrix, some at the top of the destruction matrix. So what's happened here? This vessel was exploded, mixed and churned into the matrix, which is moving southwest to northeast. It's as clear as the nose on your face. By the way, this individual, this crazy individual I mentioned earlier who keeps trying to have all of our stuff overturned and just screaming and yelling. Um, I have an email from him. We had lots of email interaction. He said to me, "If you can prove directionality, you have an air burst event." He said that to me. I have the quotation. I have the email. If you can prove directionality for this event, you have an air burst. Cosmic air burst. And by the way, we do. And it's easy to prove that directionality. We It's there. >> It's I don't have to prove the sidewalk outside this door exists. It's as easy to identify this directionality as it is to identify that there's a sidewalk outside this door. You take it out, you look, and there it is. So before we look at that, let's frame it biblically. And why do I say biblically? Because the Bible is the only ancient text that preserves the story and the name of the cities. >> Okay. Is that fair? >> Sure. Yeah. >> I mean, what else am I going to look at? >> Um, we're stuck with the Genesis text. So, we're talking about Genesis 13, chapter 13 through chapter 19. So what it says is that these cities were there. They were there in the middle bronze age time of Abraham and they were destroyed in the blink of an eye. That takes us to Genesis chapter 19 around verse 28. That fire it literally says go vesh burning stone. Now some people say sulfur brimstone. That word can mean that. It could also mean lightning. But the base meaning of that word going all the way back into the ancient Aadian is burning stone. And since the only stone they knew that would burn was sulfur. Kind of got that connection. But it doesn't mean sulfur that. By the way, there's no there's no minologic specificity >> in the Bible. They didn't have >> they don't have that level of sophistication. It's just burning stone and fire. But then it says this, "From Yahweh out of the heavens." Now, of course, uh, if this is a Hebrew writer and audience, who's the God that does this? >> Yeah, >> it's a no-brainer. You You blame it on your God. But if this account had not been a Hebrew account, it would have been blamed on somebody else's god. Fair? >> Sure. So, um, let's not let's not use the fact that Yahweh, the Hebrew god, is mentioned in this text to throw out the factuality of the narrative. >> The author was just using the vocabulary he had at the time. >> That's his life, his way, his world view. >> That's right. >> That's exactly right. And so for for scholars to come along and say, "Oh, no. We can't take the Bible historically. We can't take it." Well, here's the problem. Whenever you say you can't take the Bible historically or the Bible really doesn't match up to history, I always tell people what what history are you talking about? They don't realize that the history they're talking about is a history constructed mostly from propagandistic writings of Egyptians, Babylonians, other other people. And they modern historians have written the story and the nar have written their own narrative on what they think happened in antiquity. There is no surviving objective history from antiquity. Oh, except one. The biblical text, the biblical narrative of the Old Testament is still the best geographical and historical source or collection of literature we have surviving from antiquity. Period. Nothing else comes even close to that in terms of geography and historicity. But anyway, so if anybody wants to argue that with me, fine. Come on. Come on the Matt and Austin show and we'll we'll have it out, right? We'll talk about it. You bring your stuff, I'll bring my stuff. By the way, I love to do that. Debates are fun. >> If anybody's interested, let's do it. >> So, um anyway, so we have this uh where was I? I guess I just got wrapped around my >> construction matrix. >> Well, can I recap a little bit just to make sure I'm following? So, we have mainstream proof that >> that Tall Elam was a great place to live actually even when there was like global desertification of of the southern Levant region. Yes, people were moving in because there's these underground water sources. That's all accepted. >> But then we have this weird situation around 1700 BC where it seems like no, it just disappears. And it sounds like all the satellite cities from Sodom also kind of disappeared as far as >> Exactly. Every AR all the archaeology of that area says there is a gap. In fact, it was the Neiman archaeologists uh uh excavating that's about six kilometers north of Talam. They coined the term the late bronze gap for this region. They saw it at their site. We see it at ours. Everybody who excavates in that area sees it. From about 1,700 BC down to about a th000 BC there were no settlements. >> And then eventually around,000 BC we start to see settlements again. And what group were those settlements from? >> That was from the late Iron Age, Iron Age 2, this was probably um a store city, an agriculture store city. In other words, there's hundreds of silos, grain silos. That was the first phase there. So, so eventually the landscape had once again the ability to produce crops. >> Okay. >> So, so, so what happened in the intervening time? What happened in those 700 years that kept people from coming back to a well-watered location, >> but crops couldn't grow? >> Something happened to take the crops offline. >> Yeah. For 7 years. >> But we always say it this way. There's a for an ancient city in the Bronze Age, even in the Iron Age for that matter. Um, it's kind of like a three-legged stool, right? Two-legged stool, not real stable. >> Sure. >> Right. So, the three things you need for a stable city in antiquity is number one, defensible high ground. Number two, leg arable land. And obviously, number three, >> water, >> water, >> water. >> If you have those three things, you can build a city, a defensible city in that area. So now let's see the defensible high ground. Well, that didn't go. The topography didn't change. How about the water? The water hydraology didn't change. So which one of those three legs was taken offline to keep settlements from that region? >> Land. >> The arable land. The arable land disappeared. In other words, the event was so hot, was so destructive that even the agricultural soil was burned up. And by the way, if you read the biblical text, duh, that's exactly what it says. It says not only were the cities destroyed, all the people in the cities, but it says every green leaf and leafy plant was destroyed. Did you choose Tal El Ham as a candidate for excavating to figure out if it's Sodom or not because of the stories that had gone offline for 700 years or did you discover it had gone offline for 700 years as you started digging? What got me onto it was that and by the way um this what I'm going to describe was happening in the late 90s. In the late 90s we had just started a new archaeological project uh up in the West Bank. I was not looking for an archaeological project at the time, but I'd taken a tour group, a group of tourists, and we do that pretty routinely uh over the landscape of of the southern Levant, Israel, Jordan. And uh I had on my itinerary for this particular group, Sodom and Gomorrah. And I had the traditional sites down toward the south end of the Dead Sea, place called Babadra and Numera. So Babra, Numera, Sodom and Gomorrah. Had them on my itinerary. So the night before we went down there, I got the Bible out and I just read through the story. And when I read through the story, I got to the end of it and I thought, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. I didn't see anything in any of this text that would locate Sodom toward the south into the Dead Sea." And I and I thought, "Well, maybe I'm sleeping." You ever sleep drive or sleep, you're so tired, you just you got from here to there, but you don't remember what was in between. >> So I thought, "Well, maybe I I'm tired." And I so I went back and I sat up real tall and I read through it again and again again. Four times I read through that passage that night. When I got to the end of it, I thought, not only is there nothing in any of this because I knew the I knew the geography really well. This is my territory and I knew it so well and when I read the text relative to that, I said there's nothing in here that would locate Sodom toward the south end of the Dead Sea. Nothing. And it seems like the writers are being very specific in the early Old Testament about geography and population. >> How do you know they're not lying about geography? How do they I guess it reminds me of Sparta. How we thought Sparta didn't exist and then we found it. Yeah. How do you know that biblical writers >> people and I've said this before and I've been criticized. I had a couple people criticizing me for saying this in a lecture actually in Jordan uh one time. I think it was in 2007. And um so anyway, they said, "Well, uh I I let me tell you what I said. I'll tell you what their criticism was. I said ancient people never made up fictitious geography. >> Nowhere. >> Nowhere do we have an example of a fictitious geography. >> Not just Christian, but like all ancient texts, >> ancient writers period. >> Never made up. >> Doesn't matter what culture it is. They we can I there is no example that I've ever seen or anybody else for that matter uh where a writer makes up a fictitious geography. There's no such thing as like five acre wood or middle earth, that kind of fictitious geography concept in the ancient world. They don't do it. Whether their stories and their characters are factor fiction, that's another issue. >> Sure, those stories and characters are playing out over a real world geography. It's real world. They have no need to make up a fictitious geography. They have a whole world around them. even if they've never been to some of these places, they understand that they're either north or northwest or south. They they know where they are juxtaposed to where they live. They understand all of this. So ancient people never do that. Well, anyway, I made this statement in a in a public lecture uh in Aman, Jordan uh in the second year of our excavation and there were a bunch of archaeologists there and um one of them said to me, rather leading one said to me, Dr. Collins. Um, you should never say never. And I I know that, but we sometimes overstate, don't we? We say I say ancient people never made up fictitious geography. And she said to me, well, you should never say never. I said, "Point well taken. Can you give me an example?" See right there. Okay. You say you shouldn't say never, but can you give me example of a fictitious geography in any text >> ever? No. Anywhere in antiquity? >> It's almost cultural antiquity. They just wouldn't make stuff up like geographically. >> She said, "No, I can't give you an example." And then I turned around and and I I kind of knew the dance that I was about to do. I mean, I it was in my head because I wanted to make it a little bit more dramatic. So, so I said, "Well, okay." I said, "But if you do, uh, if anybody here, if you ever find an example of that, you have my email address, please let me know because I'm very interested in that subject." And so I I turned around to go back to the podium to talk about my u and by the way, I had given a whole hour on Talmam in the Bronze Age. Nothing about the Bible at all. I in the last five minutes of my presentation, I had a few slides where I asked the question, could Tal Hamom be biblical Sodom? I just asked the question and that's where this that's the context of this thing that this question that was asked of me. Um or this this reprimand. You should never say never. Well, okay. But ancient people didn't make up fictitious geography. Do you have an example? No. So, I turn around to go back to the podium and um then I stopped. I turned back around and I said, "And if you find an example of what you think is a fictitious geography from antiquity, please when you send that to me, include the criteria whereby you've determined it to be fictitious." I haven't heard a peep. That was 20 years ago. I haven't heard almost 20 years ago. >> What? What? >> And by the way, nobody will challenge me on You can't challenge me on that because it's just a fact and everybody knows it. You can look at the Egyptian stories, tale of Sinua, Tale of the Shipwreck Sailor. You can look at all these Neareastern stories and guess what? You can map them. You can go to a really good source like Anson Rainey's the sacred bridge. Uh the probably the finest piece of historical geography relative to the Bible ever written. And he maps those stories. They're not Bible stories. They're stories from other cultures, but he maps the stories. Why? Because the stories are going over real world geography. You could you can include in that the Iliad and the Odyssey. You can include all of that. Okay. Ancient writers had a world at their fingertips and they knew that geography well and they put stories over the top of it. In fact, I have often referred to the Old Testament as a serial geography. It's a serial geography. uh no story or no person in the Bible is introduced without that first place is established. >> Do we have location? Do we have any old Egyptian maps? Because wasn't Egypt doing around at this time? We suspect that Egypt actually did have maps, but we don't have, as far as I know, uh, anything that would represent a map that we would recognize as a map. However, the the Egyptians did produce for us, particularly in the middle Bronze Age and the late Bronze Age, did produce for us what we call map lists. map lists and geographical place name groupings and um so we can and and their their map lists were always like going up into Canaan when you came from Egypt and you went into Canaan whether along the coastal road or in the Trans Jordan uh king's highway whatever you were doing they would list those cities in order as they appear going from Egypt >> so from south the north. >> And did they write about the southern Levant? Was there any record of like Sodom and Gomorrah? It was a pretty big city state. >> Well, here's the thing. They didn't write narratives for these things for the most part. There are a few little stories, like I said, tail the shipwreck sailor sendway, those kinds of writings. Um, and they did course up into the Levant. They went places. But there were there were also two sets of what we call uh execration texts in Egypt. They're called the Egyptian execration text. What does execration means? It means curse. Curse texts. So these were Egyptians who had a formulaic geography of Canaan. These were Canaanite cities and let's just say Levantine cities that they hated. They hated the Canaanites by the way because starting about 1700 BC even maybe a couple hundred years before that uh Asiatic Semitic people were were because of climate were coursing and and flowing migrating into s into lower Egypt into the delta r region of Egypt. And in fact, so many of them arrived there um toward the end of the middle bronze age that at the beginning of what we call the the second intermediate period in Egypt after the collapse of the middle kingdom um Asiatic Semitic people took over lower Egypt. the pharaohs of the 14th and 15th dynasty who are controlling lower Egypt which is the agricultural region the bread basket of Egypt they took over all those pharaohs are Semitic they're they're Canaanite and so how much do you how much do you think the Egyptians liked Canaanites they hated them >> it's an immigration issue >> they hated them and it took them a couple hundred years for for theans in the south to get a strong enough dynasty which was the the beginning of the 18th dynasty. They finally kicked the Hixos out of Egypt. So when they kicked the Hixos out of Egypt, they came in and a whole other kingdom was born uh in Egypt, the new kingdom. And of course we have a reunified Egypt. But let's face it, Egypt lost half of its domain to Asiatic Semitic people. So they hated these people. So they cursed them. >> Execration lists, >> execration text. And so they had a formulaic geography. By the way, this geography goes all the way back to the old kingdom uh way back to the early bronze age, >> which is >> go back to um the third millennium, four, the fourth millennium into the early third millennium BC. So from like 3,500 BC down to about 2500 BC. For that thousand years, the Egyptians were already cursing the the formul the formulaic geography of Canaan. So they had a list of cities. Here are all the cities of Canaan that we hate and they would put them on cur on write them on bowls or write them on little figurines and smash them. Write them on bowls and cur, you know, curse them and smash them. And these would also actually be more accurate, I would think, because when I think in historically if you're bashing somebody, you you wouldn't lie, at least about the names of them. You you want to say who you hate more than who you love in some ways. You want to make sure you're very accurate that way. >> No, that's right. Because Yeah. I mean, you want to aim a curse to somebody, you want to make sure your relatives aren't living. >> You hit that target. >> Yeah. So, um, and that's what they did. Now, how do we know this was a formulaic uh group of cities from Canaan? We know it because they're still using the same group of cities to curse in the middle bronze age at a time when we know some of these cities didn't even exist anymore. So when once the Egyptians got in in their heads what that formulaic group of cities was from the early Bronze Age, they didn't bother to go in the middle Bronze Age and check whether they were still there or not. They just kept cursing those same towns over and over again. And so, uh, for example, Jerusalem's on both on on the early and later exe execration texts. Well, Jerusalem doesn't exist in the middle bronze one period when these things were written. It's out of business. Remember, it went belly up along with the other towns in the southern Levant around 2500 BC. So, it's gone along with all the other Trans Jordan sites. I mean, uh, the Cis Jordan Highland sites. So Hebron, Jerusalem, Sheckchham, all those central spine sites, even the great and mighty hot sword of the north, all those were out of business all the way down to 1800. Jerusalem didn't exist between 2500 and 18800 BC. Nobody was there. And so even though it's still being cur still being cursed, doesn't exist. And by the way, some of the Egyptians from uh early on, some of the old guys who were mastering these Egyptian curse texts, they must have said, "Well, it works, doesn't it? Look at man, we've been cursing these guys for a long time." And they all went belly up. >> Let's keep doing it works. You know, and and so except for except for this one. And I always said, "Now, wait a minute. If the if the Egyptian curse texts were cursing the Canaanites and Tal El Ham, Sodom was the biggest meanest city of them all. How come they're not on that list? And then I was looking at I mentioned Anen Rainey's uh and Steven Notley's excellent book, The Sacred Bridge. I'm looking at the sacred bridge and by the way, he has maps and I'm looking at the sacred bridge and I knew it was there. the sacred bridge. >> It's a it's a big historical geography, >> okay, >> of the Bible lands. It's biblically oriented, but it's very scholarly, >> okay? >> And by the way, it's the only um it's the only one you can uh academically use in like a thesis or dissertation. >> You can cite it. >> You can cite it. >> Okay. And so I I was just one day just staring at this map of the execration text cities and he has it mapped. Here they are. And I'm looking and I see now the way he has it divided up in and I'll show it to you. It's in my PowerPoint in in the big all caps in the big red all caps are areas. In other words, an important geographical region in which our cities there's cities associated with it, but it's it's a tight geographical area more than just a city. And I think probably and I think Anson if he were alive would agree with me and we were very good friends uh that these are city states. And so I'm looking at this map and north and east of the Dead Sea, right over the top of where Tal Ham is located, he has Shutu. S H U TU Shutu, >> which is probably an Egyptian name. >> The equ. It's the Egyptian name. Okay. The equivalent of that in Egyptian. It can also be rendered as sudu. The sh can be rendered s and the t can be rendered duh. Those are interchangeable. So it could be it could be written as or pronounced as shudu or sudu >> sudu. >> And I'm looking at that go wait a minute. If you take that over into the smitic and you give it the smitic nomin nominative mem at the end it becomes sudum. I'm going, why didn't I see that before? You ever have aha moments? It's like you've been looking at stuff and it just like your your synapses in your brain didn't connect up and all of a sudden it's like bang. >> Whoa. Sodom. It's right there. I didn't make this identification. Rainey did. And so I've got an Egyptologist right now working on this who's who's good in middle Egyptian. But um it's a to me it's a no-brainer. Linguistically I know enough linguistics. I had good background in linguistics. It's a no-brainer. Shutu sudu sudum are are are dead ringers for each other linguistically. So there it is by the way. Now look at this. This is really interesting. We're talking about Egyptian map lists. So here you have Shutu Sudu right there northeast of the Dead Sea. Now, after 1700, or let's just say after the end of the Middle Bronze Age, as you move into the late Bronze Age, and that's right on the cusp of that of that transition when Tolam was destroyed by fire out of the sky, and the Bible says Sodom was destroyed at the same time, the Egyptian map lists after that period going into the late Bronze Age changed the name of that location from Shutu to Abel. By the way, why do I say it that way? And I have to kind of think here for a second because I'm trying I'm trying to see if I'm communicating to people people listening to this, watching this. Okay. Abel, what's he saying? Abel. And you might want to put vowels, but Egyptians didn't use vowels and Semitic alphabet didn't have vowels. So the vowels are kind of squirly. You can you can put a E, O, you know, we don't know sometimes. So it's variable. >> So it just called ah. It's that's a glottle stop. It's not even a vowel. A >> bl we'd say abl. Abel. Well, what is you look up abel in Egypt? What does abel in Egyptian mean? It means and and when I saw this, it just like you got to be kidding me. It means to mourn a catastrophe. >> No way. >> No way. So the Egyptians have lists where they curse cities. They have shutu which is like sudu and when you add part of the smitic language it's sudum which is sodom, right? And then they changed the name after 1700. >> Yeah. >> And they changed it to Aba which means >> to mourn a catastroph >> to mourn a catastrophe. >> Now you also also have to understand that Abraham and this whole story of Sodom plays out during the Hixos period when the Semitic Pharaohs are ruling in lower Egypt >> which is actually >> so Canaanite Pharaohs are in charge of lower Egypt. Abraham's Pharaoh in his story is a Semitic Asiatic just like him. And by the way, they got along pretty good till that till he told him till he told the pharaoh that hey S Pharaoh was his sister. That didn't work out good. Uh so but it he was he was an Asiatic Pharaoh. And so this whole thing is playing out if if in the midst remember you're an Asiatic Pharaoh. These are your peeps. I mean up in Canaan, Tom, Sodom, Jerusalem, all these people. These are your peeps. Guess what? What's happening here? >> Abel, this place >> if your most important city and by the way now we we we know and and Rainey even suggested this to me. The Talon was so big and important more than any other site at the time. It was probably the city that fmented the takeover of lower Egypt. >> Wow. It was the it was the kingpin. It was the ring leader of the Semitic Asiatics that eventually took over lower Egypt. Well, if that was true, that means this was a Hixos city of some importance. And when it when this whole Hixos citystate got toasted and the word went up and down the trade routes that it was there on Thursday and gone on Friday, they renamed it. Well, it's not shu anymore. >> Doesn't even exist. >> It's able. We mourn. Why would they mourn? Would the Egyptians would the Egyptians in thieves mourn the destruction of one of their greatest enemies? No, they were mourning. This word, this word change came from the Kixos Pharaohs of lower Egypt who were Asiatics themselves. These were their cousins, their uncles, their friends that just got wiped off the map. So they mourned it and they changed the name of the area to the place of mourning of a great cat catastrophe. To me, that's amazing. >> That's incredible. >> And so is Sodom mentioned in Egyp Egyptian text? Yes. In the execration text, Shutu is located right over the top of where Talam is. It's the name of the citystate. And I think Sodom was sort of the name of the whole citystate, not just the city at the center of it, which it is. It's kind of like New York. >> Yeah. >> Is in New York. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> You know, so the city at the center is the name of the whole place. So the city at the center of the city state becomes the name of the whole city state. So anyway, this is I mean we're not talking about something that can't be verified by archaeology. This is absolutely 100% verified by geographical study, archaeological discovery. It's all there. It's all documented. 100% of what the Bible says about Sodom we find in the ground. We got to see we got to see some pictures. This is We got to get this going. This is This is crazy. >> All right. Now, shameless advertising. >> This is your book. >> Yeah, this is one of the books. Uh this is not the We're working with Simon and Schustster. Simon and Schustster published this in 2013. >> Okay. >> Um and there's an maybe a follow on. working with them on maybe a follow- on uh either either re-edit this uh revise it and update it or a follow- on. I'm up for a follow on volume. >> And because there's this goes through season seven of our excavation >> and you had 16 seasons. >> We have 16 total. So we've got we're going to double it over and and then some. But um this published by Simon and Schustster and why do I say that? This is not a self-published deal. >> This Simon and Schustster. >> Yeah. Okay. And um so you can look them up. It's not a small company. Yeah. >> You know, it's the real deal. >> You know, CBS, CBS, and they're all owned by the same big conglomerate. Well, here we are. Um it's terrific book. It's available. I'm sorry. The hard bikes are no longer available. It is available uh as an ebook that's available in in a paperback. >> We'll link to it. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Great. >> Yeah. And of course, Amazon, >> of course. >> Um so, um Sodom. Now, uh, here's some more advertisement. If anybody wants to check us out, uh, and and get on our email update list and follow and follow us on our updates, you can text, um, uh, dig sodom, just one word, digsodom to 22828 >> or digsodom.com or digsodom. You go to digsodom.com. That's just the website. >> And we were going to put talam.com and we do have that. >> Yeah. >> No. Who can remember it? >> That's hard to spell. Yeah. >> Yeah. Is there one M or two or three? Yeah. So, um digsodom.com. That's easy. And then digs sodom you can text us to 22828 and you can get that. Now, now this is from the sacred bridge. I miss Anson rainy and that and that terrific historical geography that I wrote. Well, here it is. But I want to show you his bronze age map uh site site map uh for um >> look at that. Let's blow it up. Look at that. It's blank. That's the area we're talking about with Sodom and the cities of the plain. But I want you to look archaeologically. Look at this. That's what it should look like. >> And so for anybody who's not watching it, yeah, there he has a map of >> he's got it as a blank and it's blank on the map. So he has all these other cities and then there's one blank spot where there's nothing. >> And now here here's what it looks like since we started our project. Now, I'm not saying that none of this was on in the archaeological uh reports in Jordan. It was. It is. But cuz some of these several of these have already been excavated, but nobody outside of Jordan even knew that. >> Wow. >> Don't pay attention to it. >> They published in a different lang. They don't publish in English or >> No, they published in Well, they do. >> Yeah. >> But >> it's not well respected. >> Politics going on there maybe, but a lot of people don't pay attention to what >> published in Jordan. and the Jordan the Jordanian archaeologists are some terrific archaeologists and and they have their own good journals and publications and and if you look it up all these uh were known we just didn't know about them until we got in Jordan started looking at at the in the libraries in Jordan and we found this well not only that but then we got on the ground and confirmed we went to every single one of these sites did surface surveys looked at the pottery the surface pottery uh which is again my specialty I can pick up a shirt. I'll tell you it's early bronze age 1 2 3 middle bronze late bronze it didn't matter that's what I do and um so we were looking at all of this and then of course several had been excavated we read the excavation reports and we kept seeing gap late bronze gap gap 1700,000 BC gap gap and all of a sudden we find uh in a little book written by Rammy Kuri the the archaeological sites of the Jordan Valley he was a a reporter journalist for for a long time for the Lebanon Star, but he written a book on sites in the Jordan Valley. And so we got so I'm looking he's got a catalog of all these sites and I'm looking at it and I come to Tallam and the first line of the Talmam entry he says Talam is the largest archaeological ruin in the Jordan Valley. I'm going wait a minute how come I've never heard of that? I've been all over this area. Yeah, you're you're professor of archaeology. You've established an archaeology department at two different >> I've been all over Jordan. I've been all over I mean it's hiding in plain sight. >> I've been to I think I've been to every archaeological site of note in Israel and Jordan. That's what I'm thinking in my head. I've been there. I've been everywhere. How come I don't know about this? When some when you when you hear about something that's big, it's the biggest. >> It's the biggest. >> Why haven't I ever been there? >> Why didn't I know about this? And that was very puzzling to me. And so since he said since Ramy said this was the biggest one when we went to do our sight to sight spent a couple of days just in our car going sight to sight to sight to sight identifying each one of these locations we saved that one to last because I knew you know I've been to the big sites Ashcolon and Hutsor and you know the sites were really on the upper 2% tier of size and I knew all of those sites and so I saved this one the last. So, we looked at all the others and then we drove over to the location that tall amount and immediately when I saw it, I had to do a double take because no wonder people missed it. It was so big, it didn't look like any other tell. It looked like a mountain. It looked like part of the mountains. Looked like a hillspur coming off the the highlands. So I'm but it was separate but it's so big you don't think because you can see this tell over here telekanu to the south nice bump another one over there to nice bump telran over there nice bump all these tails and then you have this monster in the middle >> what's a tell >> a tell it could be t l Hebrew te l Arabic or t a lrabic and Jordan it means ruin mount >> it means it means is a mound built up through successive layers of civilization. >> Got it. So, a bunch of tails all over the big bumps >> and all of a sudden there's this huge one. >> Yeah. And I'm looking at going, "Wait a minute." It's it's kind of like in u in Star Wars. That's no that's no moon. It's a space station. Remember that? >> Yeah. >> It's like >> Death Star. >> That's no mountain. It's a tell. It's a ruin mound. you know, so all of a sudden we're looking at this. And by the way, it was so big that people kind of missed it. And I missed it at first until I stared at it going, "Well, it's a mound. It's just big. It's huge. It's wide." I didn't even at that moment realize that that that only represented about 20% of the tell. The lower city is much bigger and it's a the lower city is 100 ft higher than the surrounding plane. And that upper city upper tail that I was looking at was 100 ft higher than the lower tail. But the lower tail is so big it just looks like a plane. You don't even understand that this is a big two tiered layer cake. And so and I don't think I even realized it on that day. It took me some time to realize that this there were two there was a wadi coming down a river coming down on one side of the north river coming down on the south and they both came around and they formed a platform and and the they went together and they went to the Jordan flowed down to the Jordan. So there's a whole platform about 300 acre platform that was city we now know was taken up by occupation. Watti to Wati of course >> the fortified town is about 60 to 70 acres inside the fortification but there were people living all over the place. >> Why wouldn't you live there? There's two rivers running beside you >> over. Yeah. I mean it's >> and you got springs popping out of the ground here and there everywhere. And so here it was and we walk and I'm we're driving down to it and I said something like holy something and I'm going you got to be kidding me. That's that's the biggest thing I've ever seen. And I was just looking at the upper tail. And so we drive down to it and there's a we there was a military ingress egress road gouged with a bulldozer from the bottom to the top. and six tank placements aimed toward the the west obviously where they were aiming. Yeah. >> Okay. So, it's a military place and they had used it because it's absolutely strategic because when you get up on top of Talam, you understand exactly why it's there. 360 views, all directions. Nobody sneaks up on you from that point of view. You You have a focal point that gives you clear line of sight to everything. And so come up to the top and kind of amazing really. Um I it was it was amazing. And what was really cool was that the bulldozers had taken out about a meter and a half of material. They had scraped blown right through the iron age wall. Remember there was an iron age fortified town on top store city. And they had and and the top of their scraper we come to find out later was just skimming the top of the middle bronze age layer. Okay. So they had literally gouged out from one end from 300 meters from one end of the upper city to the other had gouged out this ingress egress road. And as you walk down through there, you're looking at pottery. And I'm looking, oh, that's that's middle bronze age. That's that's middle bronze age. >> Just on the sidewalls from the from where it's scraped out. >> Yeah. >> You're just seeing pottery. >> Yeah. Everywhere. And so I'm going, this is something. This is really This is crazy. Why has nobody ever excavated this? This is This is nuts. And so, um, and this is going to sound like off the charts corny, but I had to do it. So everybody else went back down to the to the car and I'm walking down and um of course it's my little private moment with the old girl and Bible does refer to Sodom as her, right? Uh, so you know, I I I kneel down in the roadway there and I just take a hand of dirt like that, let it kind of run through my fingers and I I literally see this sounds like totally corny. It's in the book, by the way, because I did it because I'm thinking of MacArthur, you know? I mean, I'm thinking, you know, it's like, oh, it's historical moment, you know. So, I'm saying to someday you're going to tell me what you know. >> Amazing. and I threw the dirt down and walked off. Well, it took me five years beating my head against the then and had been longtime director general of the department of antiquities and um terrific guy, but uh he didn't want you can have any site you want in Jordan, just not this one. Told me that over and over. I went back once or twice a year. I'm just going back to you got to let me excavate. This needs to be excavated. Why do you want that site? and I tell him why why and um so after 5 years he told me why he wasn't going to allow a Christian to excavate that site and I'm I'm not going to say this on the air but um he gave me a good reason because somebody had shot their mouth off of some other archaeologists of some discoveries they had made in Jordan and they had connected them up with things that were not politically viable for a Jordanian politician. And the archaeologists couldn't care less. But sometimes things are a little little dicey. Anyway, I said to him, I said, "I'm not ever going to do that to you. I'm not going to ever make a statement like that uh that's going to embarrass you or cause you a political problem. Not going to do it." So he leaned up on his elbows, got as high as he could on his desk, and leaned toward me, and he said, "Okay, then get me a proposal." 18 months later, I had a proposal on his desk, and uh I uh the proposal was like eight or 10 pages long, and he said, "This is this is the best proposal we've ever had." But there was a 16page addendum that I added on to that and it was all my research on the location of Sodom and why I thought Tam was probably the location of Sodom and I I thought about it. I thought about not doing that. I'm just going to go in let you know kind of go in stealth stealthy, you know, I'm going to go in archaeology for archaeology sake and that's fine. I love that. Archaeology is archaeology. You do archaeology. You deal with every stratum, every piece of evidence, everything. You write it up. You do good archaeology. But it's not the archaeology that led me to the site. It was the biblical text and the geography of the biblical text that led me to Tal Ham as Sodom. And so I said, you know what? This might be a deal breakaker, but I'm going to put my research on there. I'm gonna quote the Hebrew in Hebrew. I'm going to put everything in there. Quoted from the Bible. Put everything in there. And I put it all in. And he emailed me and he said, "Are you going to be in Jordan anytime soon?" Said, "Yeah, I'll be there in September." We took a group, a handful of students that wanted to go with us and we went to Jordan in that September of 2005. And we sat down. I sat down in his office and we have all this on film. And um the DOA director said to me, he said um when do you want to start? >> Wow. >> Like an idiot. This is September. I said December. Now, I wouldn't have said that had we not our whole stash of excavation equipment sitting over in Israel. So we had all of our stuff from previous excavation that we were still involved with sitting over in Israel. >> That's close. >> So we could grab it, bring it across the river, use it, and then return it, which we did. And it was it was easier than I thought. I thought this is going to be miserable. Uh but we but it happened. It worked. And so anyway, we got there, did our first excavation, season 25, the winter of 2005, 2006 and um we finished just a couple years ago because they had to stop. You have to pub. If you don't publish, you can't keep adding to the data pile. You have to draw the line, stop and publish. If you don't publish, it may as well never have excavated. >> Is that for the Department of Antiquities in Jordan or >> It's for everybody. It's for the world. This is a at least five volume so far. Five volumes of everything, every se sector of dirt, every artifact, everything in three dimensions reported, listed, everything, all the raw data, everything published and um and of course our interpretations and things like that. Um but every dig properly if they do it properly does a final publication and that final publication uh it is going to you know we're three years now into two years into working on the final publication and I estimated in the beginning of that that it would take 8 to 10 years to do it. So >> you're 20 years in. >> So we're eas we're more than 20 years. If you go back to actually the research and discovery part of the project, >> you add five more years on. We started that in 2001. >> We first went to the site and all of that. So this we've been doing this. You have to do the ground exploration. Um and by the way, so many archaeologists do with Bible. There's they're not a lot of them aren't even archaeologists. They put stuff out there about the Bible. are talking about where this is and where the where that is. They're not excavating. They call themselves biblical explorers. They're just going out. No, if you're not in the ground, if you're not excavating, then just pipe down. Just shut up. Don't talk. Um, excavate. Research is great. Discovery, uh, expedition is great. Do it. But until you're until you're excavating, you don't know what you have. You have to excavate. That's where you check the boxes. Yes or is this yes or is this what I think it is? Yes or no? And just go with the evidence. And by the way, I didn't care. I couldn't have cared less where Sodom was located. As I said, I had taken people to the southern excavation sites all the time. I just accepted the conventional wisdom that that was Sodom and Gomorrah. And I never really that was not a focus of mine. I'd never gotten into it till I read the biblical text. When I read the biblical text, I thought, people, what's wrong with people's brains? Why are why are they not reading this like I'm reading it? Maybe I'm crazy. But then I went back later, somebody sent me somebody sent me a book by WM Thompson, William Thompson, uh a a explorer scholar from the 19th century. And then I found a whole bunch of them from the 19th century. These were surveyors and missionaries and people working for various governmental and non-governmental agencies and companies uh making maps of that region. And so these were guys back in the 1800s, late 1800s, riding around on horses with their Bibles over their saddle horns looking for Bible places using the geography in the text. And almost every one of them wound up at Tall El Ham sitting on top of it or camping on top of it. In fact, WM Thompson says he's he's up there with William Condonder who was a um a British um mapmaker and they had come to the area with you know sort of military undertones because they want to know the area. And um there he mentions in his book which one of these ruin mounds around us, the one we're on or these other ones is Sodom, we don't know, but it has to be one of these because this is where the Bible took us. And what I discovered after I did my geographical research and came to my conclusion about that, I start reading then because all the other 20th century archaeologists went south. W Albbright took him south of the Dead Sea. Now, he knew that there were no sites down there that could associate with the time of Abraham. So, he stuck he theorized that maybe there was an earthquake and they sank beneath the the the southern end of the Dead Sea and that's that's where that basin formed filled up with water. Well, what kind of theory is that? It's not based on the biblical text. It was kind of some, you know, halfcock theory that he put forth and that G. Earnest Wright, his protege, repeated after that. And then all the all the Christian and Jewish scholars after that bought into it and they put Sodom at the south end of the Dead Sea. Crazy, but it wasn't from the biblical text. But all all of the 19th century explorer scholars except for Edward Robinson. He's another story. But um all of them put it north and east of the Dead Sea. And they rec and they they talked about the it was the circle of the Jordan, the key card of the Jordan. Genesis 13. There it was. Lot looked over from Bethli north of of Jerusalem and looked over and saw the cities of the Jordan, the cities of the Jordan plain and there they were. So, it was kind of a no-brainer. And by the way, if anybody wants to read that the book, Discovering the City of Sodom. So, anyway, >> great. >> Back to the map. >> Oh, let's see it. >> Well, there it is. Uh, Taham is is the big one right here. Now, I want you to look at this. Takanu, that's what Krag had excavated. So this we're looking at for those that are listening, we're looking at a map of the Kar of the Jordan, and it's a big circle. Yep. >> And over to the east, we have, >> by the way, the the word Kar in Hebrew means circle. >> Okay. >> If you go to Jerusalem today and you drive a traffic circle and you look at the sign, it'll say Kar. >> Kar. So this is this is all within the country of Jordan, modern day Jordan. >> This is this is the divider between Israel and Jordan. Okay, >> this is the Jordan River. It goes right through the north tip of the Dead Sea, >> Israel on this side, of course, West Bank now with Jericho here. Okay, and then there's, by the way, Jericho is kind of a loner. There a couple little sites around, but uh maybe no settlements. So, here's here's uh Bronze Age Jericho and here's Bronze Age Tamon with all of its Bronze Age counterparts. And so, look at this cluster around. Yeah, this is city planning at its best. Um, every one of these towns sits on a major road leading out from Tal Ham in all directions. You can go west across the river. You can go south this way up to Nebo. You can go up to Aman here. You can go north up the valley road to Tel Dan. Um, you connected every way here. So, Talamom is right in the middle. It was never excavated. >> And let me ask you this. After you having looked at all of this, how many of those cities seem to have been destroyed at the same moment that Tal Ham was? >> Now these these colored these lighter colored ones, these all went belly up during what's called the calcic period. All these other ones went down in the middle bronze age >> at the same time. >> Okay, >> they all have the same gap. >> So it looks like there's about 10 cities that may have been. >> And by the way, there are hundred and something archaeological sites over over here. >> Wow. I'm just giving you the towns and the I'm just giving you the city, this city, this city, and then a bunch of towns. I'm not giving you the villages and the hamlets. They're all over the place. I gave you a couple. These were totally unknown unknown. This one, this one, and this little guy. We even named these Hamom Village One, Ham Village 2, and Hamom Village 3. Uh we named those because they're they're just right there next to the next to the fortified site and had never been identified before. >> So you so what this is basically telling us is that Tall Alham is it dead I mean it's surrounded by other archaeological dig sites and it's it's it was a huge city. It was a huge city right in the middle of a bunch of bustling commotion and that's proven by the archaeological records. >> Yeah. And and if you look at site maps from various periods, it's obvious that in the Bronze Age, this is the this is the tightest cluster of population in the entire southern Levant. >> This is where everybody >> very important location. >> This is New York City. >> Yeah. There are a lot of big towns. In fact, there are a couple of there are a couple of core towns in uh like Ashcolon uh and Hatsor that are actually bigger than Talam. Th those are the big three. Ashelon uh um uh Hatsur Talam that group. But the other two that I just mentioned, Ashcolon, they didn't exist from 2500 down to about 1,800 BC. Oh, they came into exist. >> They went offline when everybody else did. So, Talam exists for 500 years when they didn't exist at all. >> Got it. >> That's that's important. So, Talmam Tal Hamom for the Bronze Age until it was destroyed in 1700 is the most important city, anchor city in the southern Levant. It was a loner citystate in the southern Levant for 500 years. Incredible. >> Everybody else was offline. >> Big enough to be mentioned in in the Egyptian text. >> Mentioned. Now, just because you're mentioned in the execration text doesn't mean you're a big concern because Jerusalem was mentioned in the Execration text. >> It didn't exist. >> And didn't exist. >> Yeah. >> You know, uh, at that time, >> but it's significant. But but Tal Hamam was still one of the biggest if not the biggest city in the southern Levant during the intermediate bronze age the period prior to the middle bronze age and in the early Bronze Age before that it was the continuous big dog in that region. Okay. So that's why Talmama is so important. Why just because we say it's it matches up with biblical Sodom perfectly. I don't care what you think about the Bible you can't throw to mom out. our sight's bigger than your site, you know. It's like, okay, so it's like you can't ignore you can't ignore Tal Hamom. So, um, where does that take us? Well, hopefully to the next slide. I don't know what that even that's about. Okay, there we go. Now, so Talam and its citystate thrived until one day around 1700 BC when nobody else in the region had a problem. Nobody else went down. In fact, it was kind of a wet period. Balam went belly up and all the cities with it. How do you how how do you exist as the longest lasting population center in the southern Levant even through times about 4 or 500 years when you were the only one surviving >> major droughts >> and all of and you could just thumb your nose at the drought and you were fine which is tallam but then all of a sudden in 1700 BC the entire citystate is wiped out instant and nobody can live there for the next 700 years. >> And it was all put in a blender and for three to five feet thick, >> at least a tall hamom, >> everything's been blended up. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was destroyed. Obliterated. Literally just obliterated and violently. So, we find bits and pieces of people uh between the city wall and the palace on the southwest end of the tail. And we've got like upper dentition and piece of an eye socket and a piece of a pelvis and and pieces bits and pieces of other bones. But how are they distributed in the in the matrix? From the bottom of it to the top of it. So we're excavating down piece of bone, piece of bone, piece of bone, more bone, more bone, more bone. How many? Hundreds of them. How many pieces of pe of bone? Hundreds. How many people don't know? Two at least. And I'll show you some information here in a minute. >> Just to be clear, because you have to publish a research paper at the end of all this where you document exactly where you found everything in the dirt. You volumes. You're calling the dirt the matrix because it creates this two-dimensional grid. >> The that that we call it the destruction matrix because it would not exist apart from the destruction event itself. We're not talking about erosional detritus. We're not talking about stuff that's washed in, blown in, you know, by natural winds or or rain. No, we're talking about a single event matrix that was produced within a second or two, sheared the tops of massive walls off. How do you shear a wall that's three feet thick? Just shear it off across the whole site where all the walls across the hotel are sheared off at that height and everything in between is this matrix. Click on the right thing. All right. Here she is. >> All right. >> Isn't she pretty? >> Oh, yeah. >> Um, now, what are you looking at? Here's the Judeian Hills across the river. Jerusalem's right up here. It's Mount of Olives right there. >> If you look down here to the left, that's the north end of the Dead Sea. See the water? >> Yep. >> North end of the Dead Sea. This is the Jordan Valley. If you go right from the Dead Sea, you can't see it because there's a it's a deeper channel. So, the Jordan River goes right along here on the other side of this green. You can see all the green in all directions around this is a very even today. It's very fertile. If you get water to it, there's lots of water. Okay? They grow everything. Every kind of crop that you can imagine from eggplants to bananas, everything. And so here's the upper city. Now, you can easily see the 36deree slopes. See that? >> Yep. that 36 degree slope which goes all the way around the upper city 300 meters from here to there. >> So for those who can't see it, it looks like it's on the south side of this giant mountain. >> This is the south side. >> There's a grade a 36 degree grade >> right there. You see that grade >> goes from the top of what would be the city down into what would be the lower city. I suppose >> the lower city is down here. Now I want you to look at this though. right here. That's the 36° slope of the of the upper city rampart system is a sloping rampart. All ramparts in the near east, Mesopotamia, all in the Levant. Other ramparts are made of packed earth or debris. >> What's a rampart? >> It's a burm built up to create an artificial slope that >> it's a ramp. This disallows the possibility of siege equipment rolling up right against your city wall. >> Okay, >> so you build a sloping ram part and sometimes it slopes outside or inside or both. Okay, but always outside and a a wall built on top. >> So if someone's going to attack you, they're going to have to run up a ramp first and that's going to be a great place to pick them off with arrows. Oh, that's right. And you can't use battering rams or anything because you got to go up the hill. With a good rampart system like this, >> 36° slope, >> all you need to defend your city are a few pots and pans and a couple of rocks. >> Oh yeah. >> Because anybody coming up that slope >> is dead meat. Because because a 30, if you ever tried to climb up a 36° slope, it's all fours, baby. >> Yeah. >> I mean, you are not walking, standing up. >> You're not running. >> You're going to be on all fours, which means your shield is worthless to you. And uh so that's why this this city by the way was was never taken militarily. Now look at that nice slope. You see another 36° that's the upper city slope. It goes all the way around and it's in our site and that's why it's unique and I think it's the first one ever built. Our rampart is built mostly of laid mud brick, not packed earth. >> It's made of mud bricks. And why would they have built it out of mud bricks instead of packed dirt? >> That was the material they were used to. They had been used to that for thousands of years. And they had lots of material to make mud bricks out of. They made mud bricks. Now, as I say, every other Rampart system, and the Rampart systems really didn't start till the middle bronze age, it was a it was probably a a construction response, defensive construction response to the invention of siege equipment. >> Invention of what? >> Siege equipment. >> Oh, siege equipment. If you have if you have a wall and somebody builds a wheeled >> vehicle, a tower that they can roll right up against and then climb through safely to get to the top of your wall, how are you going to stop that? Well, this is a good way to do it. You build a sloping rampart 100 ft high that slopes out and puts you out there 25 m away from your wall. Yeah. And you can't use siege equipment. >> Stop them dead in their tracks, which is what they did. But everybody else in the southern lavant, everybody else in the Levant and Mesopotamia, everybody in the fertile crescent besides Tal Hamom built their ramp parts out of packed earth. They're just piled up dirt berms. Ours made of mud bricks. We estimate that the upper and lower city rampart system with the city wall took somewhere between 40 and 60 million mud bricks. >> Wow. >> To construct. That that says one thing. Centralized government. >> Yes. >> How do you pull all a bunch of people together? >> You know, if you just brought a bunch of your friends together and you said you wanted to you drew it around how big it was going to be and how many mud bricks you were, they're going to look at you going, "Are you crazy? >> You want to build what?" But you, if you have a good centralized government and the government says, "Hey, you want to eat? >> You got to come build some rampart. >> We're co-opting all your farms." Big Papa now owns them. King of the city feudal system break a feudal system breaks out. You want to eat well? Help me build this rampart. Help me build a city wall and you have plenty to eat. Take care of your family. And that's how they did it. you centralize everything and you can have success. Now, I want you to go right out here. Now, all of this around that you see here, this is all lower city, but I want you to see the lower city rampart. See this ramp? See this slope? >> Look at this slope. A lot of people didn't even know that Talam had a lower city. I want you to point something out. This from the top of this ramp part right here to the bottom of it right here, that vertical is 100 ft. Wow. >> It's 33 m high. That's what this one is from here to there. So, the upper city is the same height above the lower city as the lower city is above the surrounding plane. A two-tiered city. >> Two symmet It's It's symmetrical. >> It's And this this thing this thing is circular. I'm going to show you the top of it in a minute. >> Okay. >> In fact, let's just do it. By the way, what does it look like on a typical excavation day? >> Here we are. >> By the way, we were the for for 16 years, uh, actually 18 if you stretch it into COVID. Um, we were the largest excavation project in in Israel or Jordan. >> Wow. >> There's some serious manh hours. >> We have we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. We have 10 fields across the site that we excavate in. This is just field. This is field UA. This just one field. This is the excavation of the palace. >> Because you have to have trained people to document every everything they find, every layer of the dirt. >> Yep. >> It takes a >> trained archaeologist from the top. Site supervisor, that would be me um as director. two assistant directors, square supervisors over each square. >> How big is a square? >> Trained and qualified. A square is six in our in our system. Every system is a little bit different. In our system is 6x6 m. >> It's like 18 by 18 by 18. 20 by 20 ftish. Yeah. 18 by 18. >> How deep does a square go? Does it go as far as >> Well, you'll always ideally go from surface to bedrock. >> Okay. >> I mean, archaeology works surface to bedrock if you want to find the whole history of that location. Yeah, >> you do that. Now, how big is our site? Our site grid of the fortified footprint, the fortified footprint of Talam has just over 13,000 6x6 meter squares. >> 13,000 squares. >> And just for an idea, how long would it take to dig one square, document everything, and do a proper job for one? >> Some squares we excavated for for five, six, seven, eight seasons and never got to bedrock. >> Wow. >> It just gets too deep. Um, the site goes all the way back to the Neolithic period. >> When's the Neolithic period? >> 10,000 BC. >> Okay. >> Okay. So, it goes >> finding stuff. >> Oh, yeah. Goes all the way back to that. We have calcul we were there in the calcic period. That's the fifth millennium BC. >> What sort of stuff do you find down there? >> Uh, mainly we found pottery. We never found any architecture that we could say was positive to the Neolithic period. >> Sure. But we didn't. But it's so big and so deep in some places that we just never got there. It took 80 80 vertical feet to get to the Neolithic Tower at Jericho. >> Whoa. >> 80 feet down. >> 80 feet of strata down. So, um, we never got that deep. >> Did you dig at the Tower of Jericho as well? >> No. No. Um, we're closely we have always been closely associated with the Jericho team, the joint Italian and Palestinian team. We had some joint conferences at Asore and even in in Polarmmo, Italy together and because we recognize the importance of of both of those sites. We were twin cities. In fact, we called our conferences tail a tale of two cities. >> When you showed the circle of the Kikar, it looks like Jericho is is the western sister city of Talam. Yeah, they are just on the opposite side of the river about the same uh uh level that we are almost directly east west. >> And by the way, why are the towns all up and away from the river and not on the river? Because the Jordan River in the spring and the snow melts in the Lebanon mountains, it widens out a couple several kilometers and floods that area. So if you're too close to the river, >> you get flooded in the springtime, you're going to get flooded. Everybody knew that. So if you study the settlement pattern of that area, you can see how the the people managed to stay away from the >> Yeah, >> I love how much we know about this area through archaeology. >> Just everything. >> We know everything about how humans have been living here. >> Before Talmam excavation came along, people knew nothing about the eastern side of the Kar. They knew Jericho side and there's not much over there but Jericho, but the but the eastern side, nobody knew anything hardly. Not that people hadn't excavated there, but that just they just hadn't paid attention to it. And so now we know we're rewriting the history of the southern Levant, writing the history of the area because now it's amazing. I mean, this has been this is one of the most concentrated civilization centers in I would say in terms of just simply duration of anywhere in the whole fertile crescent. I mean we go back to the Neolithic period. Talle was there. Tilot Gasul the biggest sites four kilometers southwest of us. It went belly up right before the end of the calcic period because probably their springs dried up. You know a little earthquake cracked the rock and all of a sudden the spring that was above ground now is underground. They they went out of business. But where'd they move? They went to mom. We think you know their their problem was our gain. And uh so people migrated over there and we find the same artifacts at Talam that they found at Tla Gazul. So um they those people just moved. But anyway, so we we got down to the calcic period in in one area in particular and we saw how the calcic people had become the early bronze one people and how the early bronze 2 people decided to build a massive 6 m thick city wall around around the whole site. And they condemned those earlier houses because they built that big city wall, right? We have broad houses from the previous periods going right on bedrock underneath the city wall. So they said, "Oh, I'm sorry you have a house here, but uh the city fathers have determined that this is the line of the city wall and you're you're sunk." So um they built right over the top of it. >> Imminent domain. >> Imminent domain. Exactly. And um so but anyway, I like this photo because um this just shows an average day. >> That's a lot of action. >> And by the way, this is a Roman tower that was built in well Hellenistic and Roman period. We we built this wall because we built this retaining wall to keep all the stuff up here in the rainy season from flooding down from coming down here >> in our excavated areas. But up here, all of this mud brick you see up here, this is all an Iron Age 2 um warehouse. This was an Iron Age 2 store city. And so from everything from right here down, this is Iron Age. Iron Age is a little bit of Iron Age. But all the stuff down here, this is all this mud brick here. All of this, by the way, this is not You ought to see this trench now. This is like five years before we we quit digging this trench. This trench is absolutely huge. By the way, this is the kitchen. We open this thing up to 500 square meters of kitchen. It's amazing. Uh anyway, that's typical day in in the life of an excavation. This is Dr. Lane Ritmire, one of the foremost um architectural architects. Uh agological, let me get it right. All these awords, archaeological architect, that's his masters and PhD in that. He does most of the reconstruction drawings for so many of the excavations in the southern Levant. This is what uh he thinks of the middle middle bronze age city. We excavated this area. This is the temple area. We excavated here all along. We have all of this exposed the uh the um great gate one of the biggest gates ever in the southern lavant which has a pillared entry hall. the only one in the southern Levant very uh reminiscent of the Manoan palatial hallways on cite and because we have a definite artistic connection to the Manoans and um here's the palace area that's the area we just showed so that excavation was right here and of course you see it has a separate fortification by the way uh this last season uh about a year and a half ago we discovered right here a section of this wall that turned right here and went across here. It's five meters thick. It's the middle bronze wall. It's five meters thick. Mud brick and the and the ramp part underneath it. It's all made of mud brick. Millions and millions of mud brick. Amazes me the time and energy that they put together to >> and that's the section right there where you said when you go on top of it, you can see everything. You can get a 360 degree view. >> When you're sitting here, you have it all under your purview. >> No one's sneaking up on You can see to the river. You can see to Mount Nebo. You can see everybody coming down the hills to the west. Uh from the east to west, you can see over to Gamora. >> I didn't show you Gomorrah. Gamora is called Tulka Fry. It's less than it's less it's about a kilometer to the north. >> Just right there. Got it. Now, why do I say it's Gomorrah? Because the Egyptians map the Egyptian map list and Moses writing the Penetuk grew up as an Egyptian. So he lists all of his trans Jordan cities just like an Egyptian would from nor from south to north. Sodom >> then Gomorrah >> then Gomorrah go up the road a little further Adma Zaboam they all exist fits they're all there and more. So it was a little bit it was a little bit disconcerting when I get there and I see that there's five major sites encircling Tall Hamom within 3 km >> because you wouldn't know which one was going to be. >> Well, how do I pick a Gamora out of that? Yeah. >> Well, the one immediately to the north is bigger than all the others. And something, okay, it makes sense now. We just And they're all on the on the old highway. The new highways are sitting on top of the old highways. The topography of the region dictates where you put a road. And so there's always a way to get from A to B. You can get from Tamom directly to every town. You can get from town to town and you can go any direction from there. It's really quite stunning actually. Here's the gate. I love this because um what you're seeing, what Lane did was these are the actual excavated features. This is a tower. This is a 3 m thick wall right here. And you can see here's the middle bronze age city wall. And then we have this matching tower here. You have two then towers associated with the city wall itself. And then you have this palatial. See these pillars? This pillared gateway and a light well. Um Lane says this th this configuration in the center here forms a light well where you can let the light natural light in through the center. By the way, it's very Manoan. >> Very Manoan. >> And the Manowans, I always associate the Manoan with the Babylonians. And I'm not very good at history. >> No. The Manowans are way out there in the middle of the of the Mediterranean. >> Yeah. But I mean, but the same time period is like they're the Well, no. the the Babylonians didn't come along until the middle bronze age. >> Uh as far as calling them Babylonians. >> Okay. >> Uh the the the civilization on the island of Cree goes all the way back at least to the early Bronze Age. The early Manoan period equals the early Bronze Age in the southern Levant. >> Okay? And they had a connection. There was a connection. In fact, one scholar, a notable scholar said about the Trans Jordan, he said, "The Trans Jordan in the early Bronze Age looks more like Cree than Canaan." >> Wow. Wow. >> There's a lot of Manoan influence. Listen, the Manoans were the highest artistic probably architectural civilization in the region. They taught the Egyptians how to do a lot of their art. They taught everybody. They influenced everybody. They were more influential. Artistically, the Manowans were more influential than any other culture you can mention in the Mediterranean basin. Egypt included. So, wow. The Egyptians are pretty pretty good. Yeah. But they weren't as good. Their their art is not nearly nearly as good art from an artistic point of view as the Manowans. The Manoan art is unbelievable. >> Well, let me ask you about this city gate. Isn't this is this when the cuz I think in the story where Lot and the angels I think it says that the angels came down and they were entering the city and >> Yes. And it said Lot sat in the gateway of Sodom. >> It would have been right here. >> Yeah. Was and and by the way look at the size of the people just to give you a sense of scale. >> Tiny. >> Okay. >> Tiny. >> And um so here we found these two little uh things. By the way, there's a bench here and a bench here where people could sit. And we actually excavated those. And so Lot sat in the gateway of Sodom. It's I mean just logically put two into the gate. I mean you can't prove it >> but it's there. If Lot sat in the gateway of Sodom, well there's there's a bench on one side of the gate. There's a bench on the other side of the gate. Or maybe it referred to benches, wooden benches or something that were inside the the hallway. But the fact is that this is where this is exactly where the Bible says Lot sat. He sat in the gateway. But look at the size of this. This is a monstrosity. It's huge. By the way, this is a killing zone. If you're trying to attack the city here, um, by the way, this road does exist. This is not, by the way, the shape of that found this is all based on the archaeology. Exactly. >> This is not a biblical rendering. This is >> This is not a biblical rendering. This is the excavation drawing. Yeah. Okay. And so all of this exists. this this u little entry right here. He didn't show it here, but there's actually a blocking wall that controls traffic movement through this area. And um but remember the angels said, and by the way, angels, it just means messengers. That's all. So, the messengers, these these messengers from God showed up in the story, and they're about to they're going to go tell Lot they be better get out of town because their town's about to be toast. >> That the only people that might take any issue with that would probably come from the Christian background. Can you explain a little bit more why when it says angel, you think that even from a correct biblical interpretation that could just mean messenger? >> Well, it does. I mean, that's what the word means. So they they're messengers from God, but from what dimension of it do they come from? You know, >> it just means messenger. What's the original word? >> Uh in of course in in the word angel comes from the Greek rendering of the same word angalos. We get we get messenger. Um, so and by the way, just because you say a messenger doesn't mean it's an angel, but an angel is certainly a messenger. >> Sure. >> So works both ways. But I mean, it's pretty obvious in the text. The writer, if you take the the story at face value, these are angelic beings. Simple as that. >> Okay. >> But anyway, they come into the city. >> Non-human. >> Nonhuman. >> Got it. And by the way, I think I think these guys were so smart. I mean, the text doesn't say it exactly, but it implies it because it seems like to them. I mean, here's two guys talking and they don't know that Lot's as dumb as a mud brick, right? I mean, as far as far compared to what they know. >> Yeah. Yeah. Compared to their angelic knowledge, >> he gets he gets sheep, >> but he doesn't get physics or astrophysics. >> Yeah. Explosions. And these guys seem to kind of know what's going to happen. So, I think maybe they they drew out, if you read the story, uh they come and tell Lot, you got to get out of dodge. We're here to make sure you get out of here safely. We've been sent for that purpose. And Lot says, well, okay. It doesn't say in the scripture, but put some humanity on it for Pete's sake. Wouldn't you say, well, why? >> Yeah. What? >> Yeah, I like it here. Why would I leave this place? >> Wouldn't Lot say, "What's going to happen? Tell me. Tell me what's going to happen." So, I think the angel like that. Okay. He like He like took the the the table and like cleared it off like this. You got a piece of paper, you got a piece of parchment, you got a piece of papyrus. Yeah. Here. Well, look at this. You got a pencil, you know. You got a piece of charcoal. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Now, look at this. Here's you. Here's Sodom. Here's the north end of the Dead Sea right here. You got this. Here's the mountains over here. Well, just a few hours from now, there's going to be an explosive object that's going to come in from this direction and it's going to melt this whole. It's going to toast this whole area. Every every living thing, people, grass, everything's going to die. >> Let me draw you a key card real quick. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's going to show you. and all this area is going to be decimated and everything in here is going to be dead. Now, I've come to get you and your family out of here. What I want you to do is I want you to go on this road right here up the mountain probably to Nebo. I can't imagine he would send him in the same direction as they knew the blast. So, the blast is going to come from this direction. >> Blast is coming from the southwest to northeast. I think they this is total speculation on my part but >> I mean if you look at the story because Lot's response pre presumes that there was a discussion about this beforehand. So I think they explain everything. It's going to be so many kilotons you know or megat tons of explosion. Allah's going mega what? >> You know what? What do you mean? Well, it's like you know, you know, think of a think you said campfire. Well, like multiply it times a trillion. >> Yeah. >> What's a trillion? >> They said, "Never mind. The whole you won't understand it. The whole area is going to be dead." Okay. Said, "So, we want you to go on this road, I think, up to Nebo." Why? Because it's it's at a right angle. I don't think he would have made him go up the road to the highlands going east because >> debris would have chased He wants to get them at right angles to get him out of the blast zone. So what happens? Neibo is the way to go. And I didn't I can't say I personally did it. We had several members of our team that walked the Nebo Ham road several times that it's it's one of the standard ancient roads. Even the even the Romans used it because they have Roman mile markers all along that road. And so uh I think he told him to go that way. So then Lot assesses the situation and his response tells us that the discussion we just speculated about probably happened. He says, "Well, wait a minute. If I go that way, I'm going uphill. I've been up that mountain. I you know what? What if I can't get up that fast enough and and the this this disaster overtakes me?" That's what he says. He says, "Lest I be overtaken." I I don't want to go uphill. Why don't can I just go look there's a little town down here Zor down on the Arnon Gorge. It's right there along the the east side of the Dead Sea. Let me just go flat. Let me just get on a donkey and and we'll all just go fast down that way. >> Yeah, cuz I got to take my hands off. >> It's going kind of due south, but at least it's kind of going at a at a at an oblique angle to what the angels know is >> it's getting out of the blast zone >> is the trajectory of the event. He's basically going, I don't want to go uphill. Can I go flat? Go south. >> I want, in other words, I can go further on a donkey going on a flat little skinny trail than I can hoofing it >> up a fairly steep slope. >> Okay. >> And so he says, and the angel said, "Okay, you go to Zor. This this destruction is not going to overtake Zor." Dude, I love thinking about having a real conversation like >> and I think the angels again trying you see the angle here and you know he he's doing all the math maybe he's sketching out a couple of uh you know a couple of u and there's only couple of equations and Lot's looking at that going what is this and the angels say I forgot you're human okay you don't you don't get any of this but uh anyway out of dodge buddy and so early in the morning says the angels literally the angels s grab them by the hands and pull them out of the city. Get them out. Get them going. Slap the butt of the donkey and get them moving. And not the Bible doesn't say they went on donkeys either, but if I'm Lot, I'm putting them on my best donkey, you know, getting out of town. And they did. They got out. Now, what happened? Everybody always asks me, "What about Lot's wife?" That pillar assault thing, isn't that a myth? didn't like she turns to salt. >> How did she turn into a pillar of salt? >> Well, if you had asked us that like 20 years ago, I said, "I don't know. I don't know." We've been we've been looking in all kinds of Arabic literature and all kinds of literature everywhere looking for We even found an analogy of that. We found an idiom that sounded very like that kind of pillar assault thing, which was an idiom for cancer. um well maybe you know she got struck with cancer or who knows but but now we know with the dynamics and and when we go to the lab we can actually look at some of the pottery that's so coated with dead sea salt big huge crystals all over it the the the middle bronze age destruction layer at Talam has has a highly has a very high concentration of dead sea salt that does does not appear above or below it. How did all that dead sea salt get in that destruction matrix? >> That quizart matrix >> vaporized out of the dead. >> It would have been it would have been vaporized out of the Dead Sea because this thing came out of the southwest would have vaporized vast quantities of not only Dead Sea water, brine, but also the salt itself would have been in vaporized form. And then as it hit the land, uh would have just royd it. or mixed it in with the pulverized material, drawing this um you know, dust, melting it in the air, coming back down as little particles and um all of that would have been that whole landscape would have been heavily coated with salt, especially on the perimeter where you just have vaporized salt water and salt, not the destruction of the loose soil and the and broken bricks and pulverized everything. Um, but over here on the fringe, just the salt spray would have just gone up over the landscape. The entire area on the perimeters probably were just coated instantly with vaporized now salt coating the landscape. So when they went back after the blast, they would have just seen salt everywhere and you would have looked and said, "Ah, she got turned into salt just like everything else." >> Exactly. In other words, what did she do? Said they all they all went to Zor. >> They went south, >> but at a point she stopped and turned around. >> So she went back to town. >> She I think she was just on the fringe of the blast zone. Just on the fringe where she was going to get splashed over with this vaporized salt and the whole landscape in that area would have been coated and she would have been coated as well. So it would have the heat of the event would have instantly killed her. But it it was so quick and the incrustation of the of the vaporized salt over the land um as it precipitated out um just coated her and the whole landscape. So she did she became a pillar of salt. >> So her biological remains might have been standing there covered with salt and she might have looked like a pillar of salt >> but thoroughly toasted. I mean thoroughly cooked. And of course you wouldn't have l a dead sea salt is highly water soluble. It'll wash out in a rainy season. That whole landscape in a couple of years would have been clean >> and you could have been probably maybe planting again. Um what's interesting is that the salt layer on the lower city, remember I said the lower city was never built over. So you're walking on the middle bronze age ash layer right there on the top. when we're excavating on the lower city, every time it rains, and we're there in the rainy season, so we experience this off and on, uh, because we always excavated in the winter season, usually January into March, and whenever it would rain, we'd come back out to the site and it dries pretty quick. So, when we would come back out to the site after rain, the surface of the upper of the lower city is white. All white. >> Oh, salt. >> The salt just precipitates out immediately. Wow. And forms a white haze over the surface of the ground. And when you walk on it, if it's dry enough, if you walk on this white haze, it sounds like you're walking on crunchy snow. >> Crunching. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. And it does that all the time. So, well, wait a minute. I thought you just said that dead sea salt is highly soluble. the anhydride salt. So why is it still there after all this time? Why is it not in the landscape? Why is all the landscape around farmable now and it's all well because it's all sloped down. It rain gets on and it washes into the waties. It washes off to mom and remember surrounded by a massive fortification system. So all the destruction layer and everything inside there sits in a big bowl. So I don't care how much it rains >> never washes out. doesn't wash out. Just sits there in this big gigantic bowl surrounded by a fortification system. >> The ramp parts. >> The ramp part. >> Yeah. >> That's why it's there. Never washes out. Now, how then are they planting bananas now with all that salt in that soil? How are they planting bananas all across the lower city, which they are now? Well, on the far east end, they bulldozed out a gigantic cut section of the rampart >> and now it's washing out >> and they purposefully hooked up and there's remember I said there are springs everywhere. So you see these big gigantic this big around uh black water pipes from their spring wells and they put all they put a whole bunch of those in that area and just flooded the area with water and washed it and washed it and washed it for about a year or more and washed the salt off the lower city. Now, where we were excavating, where they hadn't done that, that's we still get the salt. But where they were planting their bananas, they had thoroughly washed that and they they broke out the rampart so the water would flow out. >> Successful at doing that. >> This salt that's on Talam is from the blast or or is from the >> It's from the Dead Sea. >> It's from the Dead Sea and it got there. >> So, how So, that's another question. How did it get from the Dead? It is Dead Sea salt. We had it analyzed. How did it get over there? >> How did it get from 14 kilometers that way southwest >> to here? >> And it's in the matrix. It's all through that 3 to 5 foot matrix. >> It's all there. >> There's tons of dead sea salt from the Dead Sea. >> In the matrix >> in the matrix from the southwest and the Dead Sea is from the southwest. Well, then some people would ask, well, maybe is it possible that the Dead Sea water got really deep at some point in antiquity and covered over Talam? The answer to that question is no. No, it's not geologically possible. How? So if you now if you understand the the geography you have the lake kerate sea of Galilee to the north surface that's about 700 feet below sea level got it 700 feet below sea level. >> Yep. >> Dead sea Jordan River runs down from there down to the Dead Sea and down here is the Dead Sea 1300t below sea level. If you filled the entire rift valley up with water, so that the surface of the Dead Sea equal that of the Sea of Galilee, making one big contiguous lake, Talon would still be 200 feet above the water, >> right? >> Talon's 500t below sea level. >> So, it's not possible. >> See? Yeah. So, it's not even it's not even geologically possible. And we, of course, any geologist that knows the area and publishes on it and knows that. So um the only way to physically get water from the Dead Sea into the destruction matrix at Tal Hamam is to move it 14 kilometers uphill from southwest to northeast by some manner some action what what was that? What would cause that? And that was part of the stuff we had to put together. Wait a minute. All this pottery is flying from southwest to northeast. This matrix is moving and smashing stuff against southwest facing walls moving southwest or northeast. Everything about this is, you know, the lower city almost has no preserved mud bricks, you know, right there. But the upper city has this gigantic rampart and wall and everything sheared off and there's mud brick up there. There's mud brick on the on the side away from the So, we drew a line. Go, wait a minute. In the shadow of the upper city, there's mud brick on the lower tail. On the side where there's no shadow of the big upper city, there's no mud brick. In fact, Lane Ripmire actually noted that many of the pillar stones and the stones in the wall, which some big stones were heat fractured. These are the foundation stones upon which were massive mudbrick superructures and those many of those stones are heat fractured. So, what do you make of all this? Here's here's what we did. We just simply said, "Okay, there's no volcanism in this area. There have there are no volcanoes going off in this region since human beings arrived." You can go back hundreds of thousands, millions of years. Yeah, you got volcanic activity. Okay, fine. But not since not since the Neolithic folks arrived or even Paleolithic folks arrived. No, this is not a problem. Uh the rift valley I mean this is the great rift. The great rift goes right down into the old divide gorge in in in u uh in Africa. I mean this is all connected the same. This is the same this is where the Arabian uh plate meets the African plate. Okay. So um it's highly uh tectonic but non volcanic and so um there's no volcano to destroy this area to all mom just this is not there by the way somebody said well over here at this side of you know we think is Sodom or you know we got sulfur balls we got it's nonsense absolute nonsense sulfur balls are all over that area but they're the result of hundreds of thousands millions of years old volcanic activity in that area. And these sulfur balls are in the natural maral deposits of the Dead Sea sediments. Okay? They're not part of this event. This is not a terrestrial event. Anybody that knows their Hebrew that reads the text looks at Genesis 19, it says burning stone and fire from Yahweh out of the heavens. This is a cosmic event. Some people said, "Well, you know, down at Baba, a few of the charal houses, you know, were burned on top and maybe maybe there was an earthquake and some natural gas belched out of the earth and it caught on fire and went up in a big plume and then came down upon the cities and destroyed them. This is this is fairy tale stuff that's never happened in the history of the world geologically that I know of. Just doesn't happen." And so, and by the way, that doesn't fit the text, does it? Fire out of the heavens. No, this is this a cosmic event, pure pure and simple. I mean, the Bible talks about earthquakes all the time. Same if this is an earthquake, >> they would have said earthquake. >> Say an earthquake. It's an earthquake and gas and fire belched out of the earth. I mean, they have language for that. They didn't say that. This is a cosmic event. By the way, we knew that going in. That was part of my original analysis of the text uh that I did way back in the in the late 90s, early 2000s. Um, and it's published in a little book on you can get it online called Search for Sodom and Gomorrah. That's just my textual research. But all that was a no-brainer to us. Everything that we were seeing was just bizarre. I mean, I've excavated and seen all kinds of destruction events, military destruction events, earthquake destruction events. I mean, I remember excavating up at uh up at at Tal Beta near the dead of the the Sea of Galilee. And I mean, in the gate, they were destroyed by the iron age gate, destroyed by the Assyrians. Yeah. Assyrians set the thing on fire. They p put in there, piled in there everything that was combustible, maybe dumped olive oil on it, set it on fire, and yeah, it melted the mud brick, even melted a couple of the foundation stones. I mean, you can do that if you can get it up to 1,800°, 2,000 degrees for long enough. Yeah, you can get some surface bubbling and and some some run and melting. Yeah, you know, you find it called clinkers. Um, that's known. But we found and and so when we found stuff, I knew what it looked like. I mean, I know melt, but when we started to have this stuff analyzed and probably ought to tell the little story of the trinitite. >> Oh, yeah. >> After we see it here in a minute. >> Oh, yeah. >> But, um, so we have, uh, this melt stuff. So when the astro when the astrophysicists and the physicists and the material scientists and the geologists started to look at our stuff and take it under this scanning electron microscopes and slice it up, dice it up, uh, you know, and do all the do all that kind of analysis, which is way beyond my pay grade. I don't know. By the way, we're the only we're the only excavation that I know of that's ever really done this. Who goes who goes to all the trouble to to do that big of a deep dive micro dive into your destruction matrix? You say, "Yeah, yeah, it's an earthquake." That's all they ever said. And um but anyway, uh our guys started looking at it. Oh. Oh, there's a little backstory here. You remember that creepy guy that that is just like >> Yes, the debunker. He keeps trying to debunk >> the debunker that just he's crazy man. And um you know, God love him, but I knew his work before be before I mean before we ever put a spade in the ground because of Genesis 19. I'm thinking this sounds like an airburst to me. Maybe maybe this was cosmic event. And um so I had been reading I had a good friend of mine Dr. John Moore who had been feeding me articles by this fellow. I read all of his stuff, all of his published stuff. And by the way, he's big he's big into computer models. He's not so much into the ground. He's not so much into the actual physical, right? but he's more into like comparing these things to atomic nuclear bombs and things like that and uh for forces and and temperatures and all of that. And so I'd read everything he'd ever published. I knew this guy's work really well and I appreciated it a lot. So, when we started finding this odd melt stuff, odd temperature stuff at our site, and I'll tell you about one of them in a minute, but um who did I call? I called him. He's right here in Albuquerque. He's right here at Sandia National Labs. I called him and I offered him I can't remember if I called him or I emailed him, one or the other. or maybe both. And I said, "We're finding this oddball stuff. I need a a an expert on potential impactor air burst events to come and take samples, do all this stuff." I said, "You know, I can't do that. It's not my specialty, but uh you can." And um I invited him to be the lead scientist on the investigation of what destroyed Tal Ham. turned me down. Now, I know why he turned me down. I don't have to speculate too hard. I was all over the internet. I was known as a Christian, maybe even an evangelical by a lot of people. Yes. And although he told me a million times, if he told me once, "Oh, I'm not against the Bible. I have five Bibles in my house." He's an anti-Bible guy. He's an atheist and an anti-Bible guy big time. So, he turned me down flat. Is that science? An opportunity to investigate a potential cosmic blast over an urban area for the first time in the history of the planet. And you're an expert in this kind of thing. You even were part of Tungusa and the Libyan desert investigation, all that. And you're going to turn this down. Why would you turn that down? >> What's sad is he doesn't want to confirm something that supports a biblical narrative. >> Yeah. Exactly. It was categorically he did not want his reputation to be dragged into the confirmation of the biblical narrative. He knew from the get-go that's where this was going to lead. And if he found it and so since then, guess what? So he then knowing now that I had given him a heads up that we were finding all this really oddball stuff that's totally off the charts in terms of the standard proxies for most kinds of destruction events. These were we have all this stuff that doesn't fit a terrestrial model at all. And now he has from that moment on he turned against he was bound and determined to debunk everything that came out about this >> everywhere in every venue. It didn't matter where it was scientific papers, journals, everywhere. Just casual conversation. He attacks it vitriolically as a as a man possessed. And this is not science. This is not science. And I want to tell everybody out there who sees this guy, sees anything he puts out. But I want you to know is I offered him first shot to do the him personally to put together a team as with him at the head of it to do the analysis of a potential uh air burst destruction or other kind of destruction. Didn't matter to me what it was. what we're seeing oddball stuff. I need somebody beyond my pay grade. I need somebody who can handle this, take samples, run the tests, and do this research. And he turned it down. Well, a number of years later, a few years later, we got connected up with some of the guys that 20 21 scientists wound up on this paper that was published in Nature Scientific Reports, which this other individual eventually um slandered and and and and just bludgeoned the editors of NSR um so much that they eventually after five years retracted the paper, which was totally unscientific on their part. I mean, it was to the point of immoral politics exist everywhere. Yeah, it was not science. Not science at all. Anyway, um and so um eventually and this was kind of a domino effect uh Dr. Phil Sylvia uh our director of scientific analysis. He he had written his doctoral dissertation on this pot this potentiality of a destruction event. And um we met one guy we I mean we didn't know this whole network of people studying air burst you know cosmic destructions existed but one thing led to another. This guy knew this guy and this guy knew this guy and they were all over the place. They were major universities. I mean, these are, you know, I don't know even know what their background is. Some may be people of faith. Some, I'm sure, are not. Um, but they're just they were all over the country. They're all over the world. And and and they knew each other. So, this guy says, "Yeah, I've got a piece of this from Talam. I'm examining it. You know, we're we've got it scheduled for the SEM." And uh he said, "Well, can I get a piece of that? Can So, we have all this stuff." So, we're starting to parcel it out and they're slicing it up and dicing it up and our little samples are getting smaller and smaller because everybody's got pieces and and we keep finding it every season. Keep finding, well, oh god, this is melted mud brick. Oh, here's melted this, here's melted that. Look at all this stuff. And so, there's plenty of stuff to go around. So, we're sending it all out. And so, they wind up 21 scientists after six or eight years of looking at this stuff, they they publish it. And then this this other detra this detractor just goes goes ballistic. But I want people to know the guy who's the biggest screamer against this was the first person I offered >> the opportunity and it would have been a paid gig. I offered him the opportunity to step up and study a potential air burst over a urban area in antiquity and uh he turned it down flat. Well, I think you're to be commended for that and I appreciate you staying true to the science about about the whole thing. So, um and and it's understandable why you would go out of your way to mention this because the level the number of human beings that will ever be at the point the level of sophistication of history of linguistics of of of cultures of the time to be able to have an informed opinion which we will base our textbooks on is very small. And as you mentioned before, the the earlier site of Sodom Gomorrah was misplaced because of like two people. So you want to get this clear and you want to you want to leave this for the archaeological record precisely because you know that one or two voices can deviate the course and send it off. >> Exactly. And let me say this for let me say this for for the record. >> What what record is there like a >> cosmic record? >> The NSA is always listening for the NSA's record. >> Listen and I've said this from the beginning said this. Oh because some people even came along just from the geolog geographical point of view. Some people have that come along and said, "Oh, Collins, yeah, he found this great site. Tom's a great site, but now he's trying to make it into Sodom." Anybody that says that has no clue what they're talking about. They do not know the history of it. They don't know my history. They don't know any of that because I didn't just run across this great I didn't even know it existed. I didn't know I didn't know the name Talam. I didn't know it because I thought Sodom was at the south end of the Dead Sea. That was that was fine for me and I didn't really care. But when I read the text, when I started to analyze the text, I'm an analyzer. When I analyze the text, what I had always believed didn't sit right. Didn't feel right. Didn't sit right. Wasn't right. And I've always been I am an evidential factualist. That's what I am. whatever else that whatever other pigeon hole that sticks me in and some, you know, tag, however people want to tag me, that's fine. But I get where I get on the basis of facts and evidence. I go where the evidence leads. I couldn't have cared less. And I still don't care where Sodom is located. I do not care where Sodom is located. Central Park, you know, Brisbane, Australia, I don't care. I don't care. Of course, we all know it's over in in uh Nevada, right? So, but now it's more like Disneyland than it's autumn, you know. But I don't care. Why Why would I care? Why would an objective historian scientist/archchaeologist care about where something is located? Why would I care? There's no theological point to be made. there's more moral point to be made. There's no point There's no point to be made. >> I do appreciate you taking the time to clarify on this because to what Austin was saying, it's such a complex situation and you have to know both the historical background, all the different uh you know, passages we have from this, both biblical and extra biblical, non-biblical, and then also you have to know archaeology. You don't have to 3D excavate something and then analyze things. And there's so many things happening here that for the common person that's just sort of listening, it's very delicate. And so to take time to explain that, I think is really important. And I think your work is speaking for itself. Like I'm excited to get into these photos because, you know, I think everybody gets to decide for themselves when they see it. >> And you keep pounding on me to get into the photos. I want to see and I'm going there. >> I know. >> But let me finish this little vignette. >> Um tirade maybe. Um, but people say, "Yeah, yeah, Collins is just trying to make Talmama Sodom." No, no, no. The fact is that I read the text. I became immediately dissatisfied with how people had represented the text or twisted the text in order to put Sodom in what seemed to me to be obviously the wrong place. And so, I just want to know what the truth was. So I purposefully didn't read any I stopped listening to everybody and reading anybody about where Sodom was. I went to the text. I went to the primary source to the text. I I exedated carefully word by word phrase by phrase through the geography. I followed it because I intimate. I've been I've been living in in that part of the world. Uh spent a lot of time. I walked all these places. I got you got your in my head and as I'm working through it, it was easy to get there. It wasn't hard. It was the biblical text. I tell you, pure and simple. Pure and simple. It was the biblical map in Genesis 13 that took us directly to Talam. Because the biblical map says this, now you may not be able to get this from it, but this is exactly what it says. If you really know the history and you know the archaeology and and you know all that, the Bible says that Sodom was the largest Bronze Age city north and east of the Dead Sea. That's what it says. It was the largest Bronze Age city in the time of Abraham or even in Genesis 10. It was the largest Bronze Age city on the east side of the Jordan disc. Now, we know that from the from the way it's in the text. It's always mentioned first. It's the only one of those cities ever mentioned by itself. Okay? And on and on. So if the Bible says Sodom was the largest city cl the largest city itself and then the the with a city cluster around it in the Bronze Age. I suppose if you went to that area and looked for the largest Bronze Age city, you'd nail it, wouldn't you? >> Am I missing something here? No, I'm not. I thought about it too long and too hard. And so that's what we did. We drew a theoretical map based on the text. We took and tested on the ground that very theoretical map. And what did we find? We found that everything was exactly as the Bible described. Well, only one problem. Instead of looking for five cities, we immediately had 14. So we had to do a little little working, but we worked it out. But they were there. And Tamom is the biggest Bronze Age city, the biggest most with the with the with the lengthiest occupation of any Bronze Age city in the southern Levant. Period. So it ought to be it. I mean, that's a nobrainer. It's We know where it is. We know the area. Pick the largest one. And you have it. And we did. And and I always tell you remember that blank map I showed you. There's that blank map. This is Anson Rainey's map. Archaeological sites in this region. And he has the eastern Jordan disc as a blank. But here's what I always say. Why is it blank? Because nobody paid attention to the biblical to the literalness of the biblical text and of the geography of the cities of the plain. Nobody took it seriously. So they never looked. So, they didn't take it seriously and they didn't look and they didn't find it. But we did and we did and we did. Simple as that. It was the Bible of Genesis 13. That is the biblical map. Everything else is secondary to that one geographically. That's the biblical map. It took us there. So, it introduced me to Talam. And everything else is history from there. I can't help it if I follow the map. Don't blame me for following the map. Don't blame me for trying to make something into something that's not something. It is something. The text didn't lie. It was right all along. And Anson Rainey and I even had lots of discussion on this. And he was before he passed away, he was about ready to re-edit that section of the sacred bridge to put Sodom in the right place. And I had lots of scholars, by the way. Everything I put out for that little book that I mentioned, all my textual research, I had I had what's called a 50 scholars list. Everything I put, every paragraph that I wrote, everything that I wrote, I sent to all 50 scholars. And I asked them, this is my little peerreview group. These are the top archaeological scholars on the planet. I sent it to all of them. And I asked them, "Critique me, critique my logic, my ex Jesus, anything and everything, and tell me where I'm wrong." And if they said something, then we would interact. And and I have hundreds of pages of this stuff. And nobody nobody was successful in arguing me down on it. I allowed them to do it. I wanted them to do it. Can you because I don't like believing something, holding something, putting out an idea, a hypothesis becomes a theory, becomes pretty much a fact. And then and then 20 years later, somebody comes out of left field. But what about this? Oh, oops. I didn't see that. No, no. I I can't imagine our research being less comprehensive than it is and remains. We look at everything. climate, I mean, geology, astrophysics, ar the archaeology, the strategraphy, I mean, everything. Run it out to to the max. It's all there. And so, so those who don't like to embrace that archaeology supports this biblical story of Sodom. Put that's on you. Don't put it on me. I go with the facts. 100% fact. Tell me one thing and and I will always put this out there. Tell me one thing that I've said about Sodom and the excavation and all the stuff I put together in every way about Sodom. Tell me what's not true. If there's something out there you think isn't true or you want to see the evidence of, get on an airplane. Do yourself a favor. Get on an airplane. Come here to Albuquerque and sit down with me for 10, 20, 50 minutes, a hundred hours. I don't care. Sit with me and before we get up from that chair, you will be convinced that I'm right. I guarantee it. If I had the money, I put a dollar amount on it. >> I love that. >> So, I mean, I'm that sure. >> Yeah. >> And let's hope somebody Oh, you're just a you're just a person of faith. This is nothing faith. It's nothing to do with faith. All the faith guys put Sodom at the south end of the Dead Sea. Not not all of them. >> That's right. >> But it's like, no, this has nothing to do with that. This has to do with text, archaeology, geography. It has to do with these kinds of things. And I can't and so I can't help it from Genesis 19 that that phenomenological language pulled in the idea of a cosmic event. and all the archaeological evidence, physical evidence actually attests, leans in the direction of that kind of event destroying the city. I mean, and the people who try to be detractors on this, oh, please, please spare me. Don't go off and say, "Oh, we have that at our site. Oh, we have Melt product. We have this." In fact, in fact, I did a I did a presentation on the on the Hamomam terminal destruction event, middle bronze destruction event from the time of Abraham. I did a presentation and I do one almost every year at ASOR and I I was presenting three three Acors ago and um so I gave my uh paper and a guy stood up in the end uh of it and he said uh oh we have that stuff at our site that Mel, but all the stuff you're finding is just common destruction stuff. I said, um, how many how can I ask you how many uh boiled zirkons do you have on the under the surfaces of pottery or other melt products at at your site or any site that you can document for me? And he he just didn't say anything. I said, "Oh, by the way, a zirkon melts at just short of 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. I mean, boils We have we have pieces of pottery and other melt products with zirkans next to the next to the the viscous material that are went to boiling went to offging said I said I'm sorry you can't do that with anything terrestrial not with a kiln not with a metal smelting furnace nothing. I'm sorry. It's not my fault. >> That's awesome. >> Stay with the science, people. Stay with the science. So, so where are the myths and legends? Sodom is not a myth. The existence of Sodom, the destruction of Sodom, the location of Sodom, none of that's mythical. There's not, there's not one mythical syllable to that whole thing. You know where the myths are? The myths are, I find, the myths and the silliness are in the minds and the mouths of the detractors. those who are trying to come against it, they're not bringing science, they're bringing conventional wisdom. And convisional wisdom is often the enemy of science. When this um Nature Scientific Reports article came out in 2021 and I told the guys, you know, and I was not on the paper, they were focusing on our work. They were doing analysis from our site, but I didn't feel I said, you know, this is this is going to be physics and astrophysics and all of that and that's that's not my expertise. I mean, I can sit there and I can enjoy it and we can talk about it, but I can't really contribute to that. And um so they did it. 21 authors did a great job and but when it came out they had me there there was a push back that was from a few sectors that was just crazy but I had told them you know I read through the paper they sent it to me okay read through it and fact check it and from your perspective as the dig director And so I did and um they had made a statement in there. Here's what they said. They said perhaps I can't remember whether they stated it or they made it a question but the gist of it was this could this destruction this this fiery cosmic destruction of Tal Hamom be the seedbed from which the Sodom story in the Bible arose? Now, anybody with half a brain writing this and researching that and knowing the what it says in in Genesis 19 would put two and two together. You would have to ask that question. But I told him, keep the Bible out of it. Don't mention the Bible. Don't mention Sodom. It just because people will freak. Now they're in their they're in their world. in the hard sciences world and I'm working in the squishy soft sciences of of archaeology and I so I I know what the anti-Bible sentiment is and how people tend to lose their minds and said so just don't do it but they said but we have to mention it because if we don't mention it then somebody's going to say well haven't you guys ever heard of this Didn't you ever read that? Didn't you ever consider that >> correlation? >> So, we had to ask the question so people at least be aware that we know that it's it's out there. >> It's embarrassing not to bring it up. >> Yeah. Exactly. So, they said, "We're going to bring it up. We're going to mention it." I said, "Okay." Um well when it came out uh not everybody by the way it it became uh in its life with with Nature Scientific Reports it was downloaded way over 600,000 times making it the top accessed online journal paper in the history of online journal paper. >> Wow. I mean it went if a if a scientific journal paper can go viral. >> It went as viral as a scientific paper. >> I mean most of these papers get read five times or 100 times you know by people who are really interested or or ignored all together. >> Yeah. >> And but this one just went everywhere. It got a lot of support by the way >> and um by by scientists who understood it and but yet there were there was some push back. There was there was one uh anthropologist I think she's probably more of an anthropologist than even an archaeologist. Um she accused NSR of caving into evangelical Bible thumpers. >> She accused the hard scientists of caving >> caving to the Bible to the Bible thumpers. >> Yeah. M >> it's like well I don't think so but and and then she she said she called the mention the connection of of this event that they wrote about at Talam and Sodom that that was clickbait. She called it clickbait. Well, which was one of the dumbest things I'd ever heard in my life. And so I I emailed her cuz I know her. I emailed her and I said, "Hey, you know, I got to you you you're the one that threw this up publicly." Uh it was it was an op-ed that she did in in home in Sapiens, the the online anthropology journal. And I said, "You're the one that put it up there." And I have to, by the way, I haven't responded yet. It's been a a good a good while, but Sometimes these kinds of things are are best served up uh with a little study behind them. >> Yeah. Right. >> A little extra a little extra effort behind them. So, I'm not in a big hurry, but I will respond to that. But this is kind of a response here. It's like, okay, uh, call it clickbait if you want, but the point was is that this is a this is fair science. It's a fair theory. Even if you just wanted to test the nature of the destruction event and suggest that the biblical text, the writer of that biblical text might have drawn on oral tradition or other kinds of of of information uh exchange to to write this story. It's a fair statement. The point of it was being balanced scientists, not trying to get people to read the paper. It's not clickbait. It's just a fact. So, the whole concept was just that. Well, anyway, I asked I wrote the editors of Sapiens. I said, she said this. I'm the excavation director of in the center of this whole thing. I would like to write a respon an op-ed responding to her. And you know what they said to me? It shows you how scientific anthropologists are. By the way, that's my background. I start off in anthropology, my undergrad studies. Okay, that's my background. I understand these people because I are one. And um but and it's very soft science. Uh an anthropology basically uh operates like this. And I it's it's not not a hard criticism because I understand this. It's perhaps maybe possibly therefore that's what the soft sciences do. >> Sure. So it's kind of theory based on theory based on guess and and then come to some kind of conclusion which would never fly in chemistry or physics, you know, just wouldn't. So but that's what they do. And so, um, I asked to write to write a response and they said, um, well, no, I think enough has been said on this subject. Really, one person's view on radical view far far on the other side of the spectrum. And where's the balance? What's wrong with you people? And of course they just dropped it and they they wouldn't talk to me anymore. They did not want me to respond to her and that would have been scientific and that would have been fair and I would have been fair cuz I know this person. Sure, >> I given her a personal view personal tour of our site and I understand where she's coming from. But when it comes to her assessment of the Bible and how she treats it and her understanding of it, she has no clue what she's talking about. So she's just she's not informed. And so if I'm unin uninformed about something, then I think if I'm going to talk to somebody, criticize somebody on something of which I'm not terribly informed, I should become informed first. and maybe I should have that discussion. She has my phone number. She has my email address. Anyway, so these kinds of things happen. >> Strange times. >> Yeah, it's strange times. And so, but I knew I knew I have a long history with this. I knew what a certain sector of the biblical studies people and the archaeologists I knew how they would react to the idea that Tal Ham is Sodom and that it was destroyed exactly as the Bible says by a fiery cosmic destruction. Um which I always want to say none of that's my fault. It's just it's objective reality. Um, but I but I have in in print and in a lot of venues given those who don't want to believe this, who think that everything in the Bible is pretty much eeteological legends. I've given them an out. And here's the out. Because the destruction at the middle bronze 2 destruction layer at Talam is a a one-of-a-kind one-off destruction. There's nothing else like it. In fact, I had one scholar recently say to me that he's been looking at this and he said, "Wow, it's kind of pompeish, isn't it?" And I said, "Yeah, I think you're starting to kind of get the feel for it." I mean, we're not talking about vulcanism like that, but we're we're talking about something that was very directional. >> Yeah. >> And so anyway, I gave him an out. And here's the out. Toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age around 1700 BC, a a sizable space object, you know, be it a an asteroid or a comet fragment, came into the atmosphere at a very fast pace. uh at a very low trajectory and blew up and destroyed completely what had here to for been the longest enduring bronze age civilization in the southern Levant destroyed it. And from that reality, from surviving people around the area, oral tradition and lore sprang up, which eventually found its way into the Abraham story in the book of Genesis. That's fair. >> It's fair. >> It's true. It's real. It's unbiased. And it doesn't take a person of faith to adopt that view. But but what I don't want people to do and I've warned people if you if you come against this idea that Tolamom/Sodom Shutu was destroyed by a fiery cataclysm out of the sky exactly as Genesis 19 describes. If you push back against that and you keep trying to say myth, myth, myth, you can't put myth and archaeology together. It doesn't work. Well, it's not a myth. I don't care what you think about the characters and and other aspects of the storyline with geographical stuff, the fact of the event itself and all of that. It's coming out in the archaeology and I'm sorry. >> It's in the destruction matrix >> and I can't help it. And it's going to turn out to be a slam dunk fact. It just is. I see it from the inside. There's a lot of stuff. There's more unpublished at this point in our in our publication. We're still researching. There's more stuff not published than published. Okay. So that little paper tangoska uh like destruction of Talmom that that's just tip of the iceberg. Okay, there's more. I don't deal with that micro stuff. I don't know. I don't own a scanning electron microscope or have access to one immediately around me, but I know the archaeology. I understand strategraphy. I understand, you know, but but these guys who don't know one end of a trial from the other have no right to criticize the archaeology side of it. So if you want to come in and sit down, talk about the archaeology side of it, you want to pay my ticket and your ticket to go over, we'll go over to Talam. We'll look at it firsthand anytime you want, anytime you want. We, by the way, we were there for 16 dig seasons and I put out to my scholars list and all around the world. If you want to come to Talam and check this out firsthand, whatever whatever your view is about anything, come. You know, you got to get here on your own dime. But when you get here, I will get you a room at our hotel and you can stay as long as you want and we'll pay for it. You come out and you hang with us. >> I love it. >> But nobody ever took us up on that. >> Throwing the gauntlet down. >> Nobody ever took us up on that. Why? Because I g because if if people talk to me long enough and they sit down with me long enough, they will find out one thing. I have no reason to make stuff up. I don't make stuff up. I look at the evidence and I go where the evidence leads me. If it leads left, I go left. If it leads right, I go right. If it leads up, I go up. If it leads down, I go down. Period. Period. And if I'm not and I open it up to my I mean, not all my colleagues and my even even on my team agree with me about everything. I do tell them it's free country. You have a right to be wrong if you want. But but we know I mean we we have a disagreements about interpretation of some things and artifacts and all of that. But I just going to go where the evidence goes. Here it is. What is that? What does that say? Here are 20 things. What do they say? >> Yeah. >> It's not just one thing. It's not just five things. It's not just 10 things. It's a bunch. is bunches of things that say they all are commensurate with one idea and none of it's terrestrial. This is not a terrestrial destruction. This is not an earthquake. I'm the first person who ran the sequence of earthquake proxies and tsunami proxies and military proxies and natural uh abandonment and and disintegration and all of those. Nobody had ever run proxies. What are the proxies? What do you look at in a what do you expect to find in a destruction layer or in a terminal layer uh for a site based on all kinds of scenarios? Everything in the destruction scenario in the middle bronze 2 at Tal Hamom is atypical. There's they there's no proxies there that can be shared with things like earthquakes and military destructions and local fires or general fires or tsunamis or anything like that. Yeah, there's nothing. >> Now, what about lightning? Because you said lightning was maybe the only thing that could even get that high. >> Lightning. Lightning can do uh pretty high temperatures. I mean, obviously I mean the surface of the sun is temperatures not too hard to beat, right? We got all kinds of stuff that goes hotter than that in our destruction layer, but lightning could go even hotter than that. Lightning could go tens of thousands of degrees, 80, 90, 100,000 degrees, even hotter. Um because electricity is amazing. And so the temperature on, you know, in that shaft of of of electrical discharge is incredible. And when it hits the ground, when it hits soil, when it hits uh silica based material, it turns it into green glass. I mean, it literally and it's called fulgurite and it hits and it goes down. And people excavate these things and they think they're like fossilized tree roots. No, they're fossilized lightning strikes. And it but but you have to crack it open and you see the green melt glass on the inside. And we have examples. I keep examples of all this stuff for comparative purposes. And uh but we're not talking about lightning strikes and dendritic uh green glass and all of that. We're not talking about that. We're talking about stuff that's spread over just about every place we excavate on the site has some kind of oddball melt high heat product. >> So, it's all over the place. That's like speed lightning. It's like it's too surface area. >> Well, and people have asked me, well, if that's true, then how come the faces of the ramparts and the whole place hasn't melted >> into like glass? Well, you don't understand the dynamics of the event. The dynamics of the event is not just the heat pulse is one thing, but the concussive pulse is another. The compuls the comp conc concussive pulse say that 10 times uh has destructive dynamics. It'll blow your walls off their foundations. It'll smash things, break things, pulverize things, obliterate things. Um, it'll strip flesh off bone. I mean, just the air movement at at those speeds, they they estimate the lateral air movement in this event at 17 km/s. >> Wow. >> Even without heat, that'll strip flesh off bone. >> So, if if something would have struck the Dead Sea prior, because I I imagine if this were a comet and it were breaking apart, you might have had multiple impact points. If something would have hit the Dead Sea first, thrown some vaporized salt up in the air going 17 km per second, you said. >> Yeah. >> That might explain how you ended up with salt 14 km away. >> Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. >> Maybe by maybe a different part of the comet or whatever would have hit uh the site, but maybe you already had some of some of the water going into. >> Uh we don't have any right now. I'm not I'm not saying that there maybe aren't uh little little craters here and there uh that were little caved off impactors. That's possible. But then there's lots of erosion and and there's lots of aluvial deposition in the area. Just meters of it. So even if those things did exist, they would have been buried in this area long ago. But um yeah, I it's and and and they think it didn't it didn't actually hit the Dead Sea. It's just this concussive pulse would just vaporize and push everything up over the landscape. And um so yeah, the dynamics of that are are as I always say beyond my uh pay grade. But it's but still as as an archaeologist what I see is when we excavate the matrix and you look at the matrix going this is uh this is freaky not normal. I got pieces of this vessel 100 pieces of this vessel and some of them are over there some are over there. Some are 20 30 mters in that direction. We even have some that we're thinking and I can't say absolutely I can say absolutely on the ones we've already identified cleanly uh but because they join we have joins but I have I have one working I I don't have a join but it's a it's a unique it's the only fabric vessel fabric of this type that I've seen uh in that stratum and I have two pieces of this vessel it could be two vessels could be the same vessel could be two vessels. Um, but they look the same. I mean, but I can't join them like puzzle pieces. Uh, but they're 150 meters apart. One's 150 meters downrange from the other one. >> I'm going to I'm going to ask again. I got to see some pictures here. So, >> and so, um, All right. All right. Let's just quit the chatter. So, Collins, shut up. The shut up. >> Well, I love it. That's I want I what I love is because I've seen a few of these pictures before and I think that the picture is worth a thousand words and I think that that's one of the things that's so helpful to your point is staying true to the science around it. >> All right. Well, I'm going to jump through a couple of these and uh because this this is just basically uh talking Ammy Moar here talking about research related to this subject should be conducted in the future on what >> simple analysis of destruction events. Yeah. >> Because he's complaining that nobody does this. So um uh and and so this is what I put together. So warfare, fire, localized fire, generalized earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, volcanism. So here are the seven. And I'm just going to go through these. Uh here are warfare proxies. You know, this is just what you get when you get warfare. This is what you get. Not all of the above, but maybe some of the above. Maybe all. And um so these are the kinds of things you get. Um, what about for uh fire general? And notice that pottery on floors, intact or broken in places, that number four, that's in every single one of these except for floods and tsunamis, which tend to push stuff around. >> Yep. >> Okay. So, >> so this is distinguishing between the different types of of uh matric matrixes or when you're doing a dig, these are the these are the different features you would see if it's a local fire or general fire or whatever. If you don't, and by the way, there's been a lot of criticism about people's interpretation of their destruction layers. >> Sure. >> That they said, "Well, this is warfare or this is this battle that took place here and so on." They said, "No, this was just a like a local fire and you only happened to excavate this part of the complex and the rest of it wasn't so burned." A lot of that has come about a lot of criticism of people's interpretation of destructions and I know it well. Um, earthquakes. Earthquakes are pretty easy. Sitewide architectural damage, directional brickfall because the strike slip motion of earthquakes tends to throw things in certain directions. >> Oh, yeah. Sure. Back and forth. Yeah. Right. >> And uh brickstone scatter on functional surfaces. I mean, when stuff falls from top, it falls on surfaces. Okay. Evidence of burning. Maybe not. Objects on floors in C2. That would be common. Pottery on floors intact or broken in places. skeletal remains on surfaces or not. Maybe everybody scadaddled too, you know, in time. Um, typically these things are about 50 cm to a meter of destruction debris postevent collapse and disintegration. In other words, you got to you're going to get erosion if if the site is abandoned then thereafter for 50 or 100 or more years. Um, you're going to get erosion um hiatus with sediment deposition or not. So, by the way, this is from Talam. This is our IBA MB1 uh IB2 MB1 interface earthquake collapse. Look at this. This this wall was the outer bricks are still there on the north side, but on the south side, they're ripped out and thrown thrown that way. So, this is all according to the strike slip motion, which is north to south uh with the tectonic movement of the southern Jordan Valley. Here's another location where you see this brick fall from this same event. This is the kind of thing you get. >> So these these are from earthquakes. Those two photos >> that's from earthquakes >> because there were two earthquakes at Talm prior to this >> one in the EB3 EB2 interface. Yeah. 23 interface. >> And those are those tectonic plate interfaces. Is that what you're saying? EB2 is a tectonic. >> Yeah. The Jordan Valley is sitting right on top of this. >> Okay. >> That's where the that's where the two plates come together. right where the Jordan River is since an old >> So the Jordan the whole Jordan Valley is tectonically active. >> Okay. And so there are >> in fact what's scary right now is that it hasn't done anything in a long time. >> Okay. >> It's way overdue for a good shake and everybody knows it but >> same thing in California. >> Same like San Francisco. Yeah. >> Um flood proxies architectural damage to building architectural collap erosional damage waterborne sediment deposition. That's important. objects on floors or pottery on floors in C2 or things can be moved around skeletal remains or not typical in other words you just run what's possible and um I think I have a doctoral student about ready to launch into this whole thing as a doctoral dissertation pulling from various sites the documentation of various kinds of proxies from these kinds of destructions. So anyway, um, and tsunamis and I always thought I'll go through this. I don't think we're, uh, any danger of a tsunami at all. >> No, I don't think the Dead Sea is tsunamis. Volcanism, uh, sitewise, directional damage, ash, pummus, objects on surfaces, pottery on surfaces, skeletal remains or not, um, destruction made postevent collapse, all that. So you can run all those proxies. thing about it is our matrix in the MB2 doesn't have any of these >> proxies. It >> doesn't fit. >> Doesn't fit at all. And I'll show you the list in a minute. >> Um, so we have a sense of directionality. It's coming from the south. But by the way, our site sits on the diagonal. It's oriented southwest and northeast. The length of it is is the southwest and norththeast axis. Now here's north. So this thing is falling from the coming falling from the southwest to northeast. Okay. And uh look at this wall. This the bricks are still articulated. >> Oh yeah. It was raised. It looks like >> Yeah. Not only that, it fell and it was and it was like all of a sudden it goes flat. >> Sheared off. >> Yeah. And that's the only piece we found on the entire lower city. That's the only piece of intact mud brick in this whole area. Wow. Which >> except for the ramp part. >> Which piece in this photo fell exactly? Is it Are you saying the whole this whole wall? >> Just this wall. Not this is a foundation. This wall is falling off a foundation way in this direction. >> Okay. >> Okay. >> And then get sheared out. >> So you see that collap? It just went flat like that. That's the only piece we found intact. Everything else is just gone. Now look at this. You could say, "Well, look at this. Uh this could be earthquake." I admit this could be earthquake but not the other stuff in it. >> Right. >> Okay. But look at this pot. Here's the floor. You clean off the floor. It's sitting three or four centimeters above the floor. There's matrix underneath it. So this thing had to be pushed up or raised up or airborne slightly. And by the way, it's leaning falling in a northeast direction. >> Mhm. >> Okay. It's leaning in a northeast direction. Here it is after it was completely excavated out. But you can see this some mud brick. This is just little pieces of pottery. And if we if we zoomed in tight, you could see pieces of uh carbonized material, flexcks of broken plaster. In other words, it's the quiz artifact. It's the groundup material that's consistent throughout the whole matrix surrounding surrounding this. Um here's the palace area. This is just field UA looking down from the top from a photo. Here's the way it looks. By the way, here's the city wall as we excavated it here. Here's a tower. Um, and it goes on around like this. This is the middle bronze age period. Here's the middle bronze age palace compound. Here's the service wing. 500 500 square meters of of kitchen. And by the way, the walls around the perimeter are 3 feet thick. I'm sorry, 3 meters almost 3 meters. >> 9 ft. >> And they're really big. So this thing is four or five stories tall and with a big open plaza in the center and the footprint of the Talaham Sodom Palace is just a little bigger than the footprint of the White House. >> Wow. >> They'll tell you that this is not small potatoes. >> Yeah. >> All right. Now that that yellow line right there, that's the top of the middle bronze age layer. That's the destruction layer. And look at you even have you even have stones being thrown into the midst of the of that matrix. And here's here's a floor right here. And on top of it is other debris which I don't have time to go into. But that's the people who showed up much many centuries later. The top of that tail was as flat as a pancake >> because it was sheared off and filled in by this destruction debris. >> Wow. And here it is again looking at a different angle. That yellow line and the the red line shows a little bit of postdestruction detritus. >> But that line right there is the this wall. All the walls that you see here were up to this level. We excavated some down and removed some of the mud bricks here so we could see the construction. >> What's detritus? >> I'm sorry. >> What's detrit? >> Oh, detritus is like debris. >> Okay. Debris. So, it gets sheared off and then a little layer settles on the top. >> How big is all this? I think there's a uh this wall right here. I think there's somewhere in here there's a a meter stick. That wall right there's a meter wide. >> Got it. This me this is almost three. So, um anyway, that's that destruction. Everything above that was built a thousand years later in the irony. Whoa. Here it is again. I want to show you this. Look at here's a wall. Here's the side of the wall. Now we're in the destruction debris here. Look. Brick straight up and down. Brick sideways. >> It's the quezard. >> It's the quez an art effect. Here it is again. Floor debris burn. More stuff. Rocks strewn. Um these we think we actually we haven't had it analyzed yet, but we have a lot of fibrous material. We think these are rugs or textiles, >> okay, >> that have been burned and and just just they just wound up in the matrix. >> They're just strewn in the matrix and they just sitting like half above the floor. They just smoldered >> in place and but it's very fibrous material. Here's some more. Uh piece of a jar. We This is very common. Piece of a roof beam. A jar. plaster floors or plaster ceiling uh stuff, mud bricks. It just everything's just churned and piling. >> It's jumbled together, >> jumbled >> the ceiling, the pots. >> And this is up in the matrix. This is not close to the floor. >> Okay, >> here again. Pieces of wood beams. Look at this. By the way, this there's no horizontal. This is up. This is under. This is under. So this is under this. This is under this. This is under this. This is vertical. So there's almost a meter of verticality here. And you have all the same vessels in the same destruction matrix just piled over and churned. And the and you can see how this vessel is mashed. This vessel's partially there. So some of these vessels are partially there, but none of them are completely assembbleable because pieces of them have been blown away, >> launched. So, I have to ask myself, uh, all of these were sitting on the ground and somehow they all popped up to different heights. Uh, >> they all got moved horizontally from some other location and wound up in the matrix. Yeah. >> And what's interesting is even some this, see this dark stuff? >> That's all barley. >> That's all carbonized barley. This thing's full of it. This had some. This barley is just being strewn with it. It's just kind of mixing in because these are jars full of grain. Where's what's h when your jar breaks? What happens to the grain in the matrix? >> It just gets strewn in there and lands where it lands. >> Wow. >> Here's another one. This is the floor. The bottom of this jar happens to be sitting on the floor, but here's the handle. Here's more pottery. Here's pieces of other vessels. There's about 10 or 15 different vessels represented here. And pieces of pieces of carbonized material. And here's we find these this piece right here. Here's what happens when you clean it. You see the this is all viscous melted. See the vesicles? >> This is all boiling >> bubbles. >> Looks like Yeah. Looks like >> hot bubbles. >> Looks like lava. Yeah, >> it's not. That's the color of it. It's greenish greenish glass. This is what you get when you get a really high temperature melt. And of course, if you get underneath it, what you see in this structure, this is a melted mud brick. and it's like 6,000 8,000 10,000 degrees. >> Well, they're different temperatures. Sometimes the surface temperature, this viscous melt got up to, you know, 3,000° or 2500°, but that's still hotter than lava. It's hotter than you can get in a kil or you can get in a, you know, in a metallurgical factory in antiquity. I mean, to melt >> copper, you only need about 16-800 degrees. To melt steel, you only need about 1,800 to 2,000 degrees or to melt iron. So, this is way beyond the temperature needed to to do any kind of uh metal work or or or pottery, >> all your regular day-to-day activities. You're never bringing something to 3,000 degrees. So what the analysts did was they go down and inside these vesicles, slice this stuff up and look at it under scanning electron microscope or a a microanalyzer and they look at what's in there and they will see pieces of this glass in the inside of these vesicles that have things like melted um uh melted or boiled quartz crystals or zirkon crystals or things like that. And this is this is topping out at ridiculous temperatures. And so, by the way, if if you had thousands of degrees uh for for five seconds, this thing would be a puddle of glass. >> It's a flash. >> This is quick heat >> melting. Quick off heat. >> And off heat. It's coming and going quick. >> Yeah. >> And if it's not, then we're, you know, we're going to be seeing a lot different dynamics. Look at this. This is just matrix. Barley grain, barley grains. Okay. mud brick. And the mud brick's really been kind of mashed and and broken, but all kinds of like little bits and pieces of pottery. There's some pottery and uh here's piece of something that's probably kind of plastery, but this is what you get. This is what we mean. The quiz art effect have a meter or meter and a half of this. It's just ground up. There's no horizontal striations here. This is not being laid down by wind. This is not being laid down by water deposition. And not only that, but as we'll see in a second, we're going to find pottery, the same vessel from the bottom of the matrix to the top. >> And this is not, just so I know, this is not normal for archaeology excavating any site. >> It's not normal, but we still have some archaeologist. Oh, we find that stuff all the time. Show me. >> It's not normal to find a a huge matrix like this with the vertical elevation of pottery. All the things you're describing are very abnormal when it comes to excavating any ancient site. >> Exactly. And and the guy who named this the quizen artifact, he just had never seen anything like this before. So he said, "This is what it looks like to me. This is a this is a mess. It's a mixed mess." >> It reminds me of the Will It Blend guy. Yeah. That uh on YouTube where you blend iPhones and stuff. >> This is This is one of hundreds of radiocarbon dates that we have. I'd say hundreds over a hundred. Sure. Uh this shows from this is carbon. Uh this is char charcoal material. This might be a bar or something. But we have lots of these from the from the destruction matrix. You can see where the where the center median is about 1700 BC. It can go up to 1700 1750 down to 1650. So that's kind of the kind of the average. And um that's by the way this is the raw data that you get back from from the lab >> from a >> radiocarbon lab. Yeah. >> So that's what it looks like. >> So this is why you're dating it. So if anybody cares. >> Yeah. >> That's that's why by the way this doesn't tell us anything I didn't already know about the pottery. The ceramics tell tell me the destruction time is middle bronze 2. >> And you know that from your expertise in in >> from the ceramics archaeology. Yeah. It's it's the latter part of the middle bronze 2 period. Now, some people believe in a middle bronze 3, which is about 100 to 50 to 100 years long. The problem with that is I don't I I have a hard time embracing an archaeological period the length of which is less than the noise range of any date methodology, >> right? >> Dating methodology. >> That's not that much time. 150 years. >> Plus - 50. That's a 100 year range. Well, if my period is less than 100 years, then how can I be certain that it even exists? >> Right? >> That's why I don't ever use MB3. Some people do. My MB3 is just late MB2. >> Okay? >> I'm not saying MB3 doesn't exist. I'm just saying I don't think it's a separate period. I think it's just the latter part of the transition from MB2 to LB1. But anyway, >> um, look at this. Uh, there's the M. Everything above that line is Iron Age. And man, look at this. Here's an oven, but look what's in the oven. Look at the This is all collapse. This is all roof beam collapse. And it's full of pottery. It's full. And these these are all from a publication. So each one of these little alphabetical designations refers to something like a mud brick, a roof beam, piece of plaster, >> bar, a barley grain, that kind of stuff. It's all mixed and piled on top of itself. Here's some more. Now, I like this one. I call this the blowover effect. And I have a um a sedimentary geologist working on this. Um starting to work on this, but I want you to look at this. Let me blow. Here's the everything below that yellow line. And by the way, why isn't it straight? Because the middle bronze age people, I mean, the iron age people a thousand years later are 700 years later are digging trenches into this stuff. They're digging trenches and they're going into the middle bronze material below. That's why it's not good and flat. Some areas it's flat, but here you can see Iron Age foundations being dug in. >> And uh so this is this is mud brick. Whoops. This is mud brick here. Here this is something else. I'm going to show you a little closer up. This This is the mud brick wall. The stuff that's going over the top. Now, this is a brick, a broken brick, broken brick, ash, other material in it, pottery, but the stuff coming over the top. We've been looking at this and looking at this. And by the way, you can see it go around the corner where we've cut it. This goes all the way across the whole palace area. The surface about um I'd say 30 40 cm deep in some places. Um but all coming over walls and depositing like this. It's banking in a way that means it's coming over and it's blowing. This is all very fine particulate, fine grains of various kinds of things just being blown in one direction >> and deposited over the over over the edge. >> And the heavy stuff lands down here. As you go up through the matrix, the bottom part of the matrix is here. Top part of the matrix is here. Now we will find pieces of pottery in here >> everywhere. But this is in the we think this is coming from the residual blowover as the event is over. But still the horizontal winds are slowing down and it's still blowing surface particles over what remains. And this is it. This is what it looks like. And um this is going to be uh part of a separate publication. But um here we have pottery. You can see this is going in a northeast direction. Trust me, you don't have to >> every everything was going in northeast. >> That's a cooking pot. This is a crater. Um uh this is the this is a a handle and so on. This is one, two, three different vessels broken and moving in a in kind of a northeast direction. Everything's everything's this way. It's all It's not just there. It's moving in a particular direction. I love this one. Oh, I didn't do it. I should um should do a closeup. See this line? >> Yep. >> That's plaster. That's lime plaster. This is a mud brick wall. This is stone foundation. The mud brick wall here. This is the in between matrix. It's full of bricks, broken bricks. It's full of stuff flying. This is a what we call a a cooking pot casserole. Middle bronze casserole. By the way, I'm show that one to you. Um it's broken into about a thousand pieces. It's 40 cm off the floor. 30 to 40 cm off the floor suspended in the matrix and it landed against this southwest facing wall. This is this plaster marks the plaster of a south on the southwest facing side of the wall. This thing was moving. This thing was moving in a northeast direction and it only stopped because the whole matrix, it was in the matrix and it just happens to have landed going against this wall >> and it didn't shatter into a thousand pieces or anything or like how does that >> it's in bunch of pieces? >> It looked promising but as soon as we started excavating it it was a thousand pieces. >> Okay. Yeah. >> And it's taken us years. got frozen in time. >> We're still working on it. >> Yeah, >> this is that's hard. >> Got a lot of jigsaw puzzles. >> Um this our saddle kern. I want to point this out. Um I'm going to show you this saddle turn. This is a one big piece of stone about probably 350 to 400 kilos. It's it's monstrous. >> And um 2.2. >> So there it is. By the way, this is a field drawing. Uh so you see the field drawing and you see u very but I'm just showing you that. So let's look at it close. So here it is. Here's a wall and this you're going to see it in a minute the photo. But the saddle current is sitting here and I want to show you and that's pottery. Okay. This is the same vessel just being thrown against this wall and running up till some of the pieces hit this wall here which is a southwest facing wall. This is north. Top of a drawing is always north. So the diagonal gives us southwest to northeast. That's the way it's going. Here's another field drawing. There's our same saddle kern only I'm also I'm looking at the drawing uh to the north of it. But here it is. And um so here sits the saddle kern and there pieces of the same vessel that we just looked at smashed up against this wall. And we have a saddle kern. And what's did we find between the saddle kern and that wall? Pottery. barley, lots of it. Grain carbonized that was on this grinder. >> Wow. >> And got strewn when the grinder tipped. >> So, a saddle kern is a is a big rock that was made that you could sit on and you could use your body weight to grind barley. >> Yeah. Use a big grinder and you just do that. >> So, it would have had barley on it and you're saying it got knocked off carbon. >> I want you to look at this. Look at this. Here's here. We haven't fully excavated it yet, but here's our our our saddle kern >> flipped on it side. It looks like >> base of the saddle kern. It was really over here. So, and we can see the impression of it. It has rolled a quarter turn to the northeast. There's the grinding surface right there. Here's you see some of the barley. Here's vessels, multiple vessels, pieces of them strewn across the floor, moving in that same direction. And by the way, when you excavate, you don't know this. >> It's layer by layer. >> You're just excavating a square and stuff's coming out as it's coming out. So, we didn't notice directionality here until we started number one to identify where the pottery was coming from and then track it. And some of the pieces of these vessels were found one square or two squares over at different levels in the matrix in different seasons. >> Wow. So we don't even find them. >> How many dig seasons did it take you to determine or come up with idea of directionality? >> Um probably 10. Wow. I mean we I mean you would suspect it. >> Yeah. Yeah, you start if it was some kind of some kind of a cosmic event. >> But we didn't really start to get the hard >> the real demonstrative indicators >> until about 10 seasons in. >> Wow. >> Yeah. I mean, and and then retrospectively we could look back and say, "Oh, yeah. >> Oh, now we get that. I get that." >> So So even though we were seeing it, in a sense, we weren't seeing it because we weren't recognizing it. Sometimes you have to get the, you know, you can't see the forest for the trees. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> So, um, you can't step back yet. You got your nose in the in the trench. >> Yep. >> So, here it Now, here it is after it's been cleared out a little longer. You see this? Look at this. >> That's the saddle grinder. >> That's the saddle grinder. And it's it's in C2. This is where we found it. Now, who rolls who rolls a stone over like that? >> It's like a thousand 800 lb. >> This thing is huge. It's really big. >> And um I mean I suppose you could uh if you didn't if you didn't want to say this was moved by a horizontal force, you could say that I don't know the head cook came in one day and said, "I want you to turn that saddle grinder over and and and clean it." Well, can't we clean it sitting straight up? No, I want you to turn it over. That doesn't I mean, you could create all kinds of goofy scenarios about how this thing got turned over, but I guarantee you nobody turns a saddle current over on its side. >> Well, no. And and you're looking at >> this is in C2. The the barley from it is still you can even still see some there. It's on the ground. It's bank the barley is moving from here, banking up against this southwest facing wall. The pottery is migrating across the floor and banking up against the wall. Everything is moving from southwest to northeast. I mean, this is a no-brainer. Nobody would walk in. No, no archaeologist would look at this and and experience it and actually excavate it and look at it and not say, "This is a little weird. This is a little weird. Why are these vessels not in place? This were earthquake, these vessels be smashed in place." what's causing everything, including this hundreds of pound saddle kerning there rolled over onto its side. And um so yeah, you just have to be honest about it. By the way, here are some of the vessels. Painted vessel, by the way, it's the painted vessels >> that allow us to put things together because u garden variety non-painted vessels all look alike. Frankly, >> that's what I was going to ask. I thought I was envisioning just a bunch of brown pottery everywhere, but it looks like no. If you see, you can actually and I guess you can match them up, too. You start putting the puzzle pieces together and the the glazing of that the glazing keeps going. >> Exactly. So, here we are. Uh, this is just one little piece. This directionality, if you pay attention, is evidenced across virtually every place across the entire site. So, something's going on here weird. Um this is a painted um uh we call it MSCWPW stands for multi-lip crosswipe palace wear and it only exists um really at tall hamom. Uh now this is a painted version of it. Normally they don't paint it but this phenomenon of cross cross wiping with multicolored slips. Uh we've checked it with every ceramics middle bronze ceramics expert out there and we've actually taken it to him and and and had one of our students write a doctoral dissertation on it. It exists nowhere but in the Sodom palace. It's not even found at other places in the middle bronze age at Dolomam. This stuff is found in the palace. Now it is blown to the northeast you know somewhat but um it's coming from the palace. This is palace wear and the king obviously didn't want any common wear in his in his space. So this is what he what you get >> custom >> but this thing was found strewn over about seven or eight meters. In fact, some of it we haven't even found because there se they're excavate there's unexavated areas from both ends and I'm sure we would find more of it. But I want you to notice when these things blow up and they get moved in the matrix to different places, they get burned or scorched according to what's smoldering in the matrix. The postevent matrix is smoldering depending upon what wood beams and other kinds of combustible materials are in the matrix. And I want you to look at how many ways this single vessel is not only exploded but landing in different places so as to get scorched variously. This this is unscorched. But look at the scorch. >> That's not a shadow. That's a black scorch. >> But look at this piece. This piece is is scorched but not like the piece. This is scorched and this is scorched. But these two are scorched differently. In other words, they were broken apart, disconnected and landed in different places where they got subjected to different heat indexes and and an o in anorobic or an aerobic or anorobic atmospheres. oxygenated or unoxygenated atmospheres. But you can see some of these scorch marks here. >> Well, and this is also indicating how quick it was because like you said, if it was lava or something like that, everything would just get burned up the same. But these are it's showing being burned at all different temperatures. Yeah. >> So, it have to go quick and then start cooling down. >> And that's the nature of when you set stuff on fire and not everything is combustible. roof beams land in different places and other pieces of stuff land, you know, bed covers and other kinds of combustibles, you know, cooking wood and other things uh wind up. By the way, um the whole point of this this is this is called same vessel joins. So these come from the from the the ceramics registration. And what we began to notice was we have like this vessel uh which is the same vessel chocolate on white crater. And then we track it. One piece was found here. The other piece was found there. And lo and behold, >> they're on a they're on a southwest and northeast orientation. That's just two pieces. But here it is. Here it is in three dimensions. >> So we're looking at vertical. >> And here this is the levels at which they're found in the matrix. South and this is southwest and northeast. So, it's also being blown up off the ground. >> The matrix is probably it's not as solid as a solid, but it's a moving matrix that is just it's so thick you couldn't breathe. I mean, it's hot, too. So, but it's Yeah, it's it's not an atmosphere where anything living could possibly survive. And so, um but it is moving. It's horizontal. And this this shows here's another vessel, another unique chocolate on white beetware jug. And you can see those pieces where they land. And again, we get this kind of a sense of a southwest to northeast movement. And there they are in the matrix. They're not found in the same level. By the way, where's the floor? Way down here. They're found way up in the matrix. And that's that southwest to northeast movement. Here's another one. Look at those. >> Incredible. >> Look at this. Is 6 m square. So look at this. The distance between here and here and here. That's about 22 meters. >> Wow. >> 60 ft is >> And we didn't find the whole vessel. So the rest of it's out there could be 100 meters away. Now here it is. Here are the locations in the matrix. The loca the the locust Loki in which they are found. Look at this. >> This is all just one piece of pottery. >> By the way, this this look at this. This is 2 meters. >> Six feet vertical. This is 2 meters. >> This is 2 meters >> vertical. >> It just happens that this is a 6ft depth >> of the matrix in this point. I've said it's usually a meter to meter and a half. Y >> this is even deeper in this point. >> It's a lot of matrix. >> But you can see almost from the bottom of it. Here's the floor. From the bottom to the top, this stuff is everywhere. This proves absolutely beyond any doubt whatsoever. There are no mechanics or physics that you can explain this away. This is a single event matrix. >> Ah it didn't happen over. >> No, this is not erosion. This is not slow. This is quick. It's powerful. It's destructive. And this is what you get at the tail end of it. And that's the directionality of it. Now here's that vessel. Here's that vessel. It's a beautiful um uh multi-slip cross white palaceware piece, a storage jar, and it's also chocolate on white, which is makes it even better. But I want you to see, look at this piece. Look at this piece. Untouched, not scorched, scorched, different scorch. This thing is blown up, landing in the matrix in different places. If it happens to land in an area where there's still something smoldering, it gets scorched. If it lands in an area where there's couple of mud bricks and there's nothing smoldering, it looks like this. Look at the inside. Nothing. Look at this. >> Wow. >> Look at this. Look at that scorch line. It's really amazing when you look at it. Look at this. By the way, look at this angle. That's a scorch shadow. That's a right angle. >> So, something was in front of it. >> Yeah. And the heat went something laying against it or in front of it. And um this to me this is is fun to look at. And then we then in the ring road between on the southwest end between the city wall and the palace, we began to excavate this from the top of the matrix. Once we got into the middle bronze matrix all the way to the bottom of it, we start to see pieces of human beings. This is a small This is a small bone probably radius or ulna piece. These are other little pieces of bone. Um there was a piece of a scapula in here. This this is the top of a cranium starting to emerge. This is down toward the bottom of it. We've been finding bones all the way down. Here you have two individuals. Here is the top of a cranium. Here's two orbits. We haven't gotten to the teeth yet. Here's one has fairly decent teeth, but you see they're really eating a lot of stuff that's grinding their teeth away. >> Yeah. >> Each one of these people has their has their wisdom teeth. >> So, they're under 25. >> Why is that? Why are they under 25? >> They I'm sorry. Their wisdom teeth have have not come in yet. They haven't >> Oh, they've not come in yet. I said that. So, they're under 25. Got it. >> They have un unerrupted wisdom teeth. >> Oh, yeah. >> So, they're fairly young cuz I I still have my wisdom teeth and I remember when they came in. That was like a miserable month chewing on >> on your wisdom teeth on that skin. So, anyway, they're fairly young and um but their teeth are pretty decent. Uh, so we think probably they're I mean they're living on the upper city probably. So, but they could have been guards. They could have been taking a stroll. >> They're better off. >> Um, uh, this, and by the way, we never found a lower jaw, only the upper dentition and the orbits. Um, this one is, see these orbits? These orbits are crushed. And I want you to see the reddish hue. We now know that the bones that are coming from the palace whe be they human bones or animal bones are are heat affected in a very unusual way. And that's all I can say at this point. >> Okay. And this is this is the end. This is the north I'm sorry the southwest wall of the palace. And um you can see the size of the bricks. Here's an Iron Age silo that was punched into it, which is the first Iron Age phase 700 years after the Middle Bronze Age. But um you can see the beautiful 40x 40 cm mud bricks. And um so that's that was the tail end of that. By the way, this is the the most frightening piece of excavation that I ever did. And I did it myself because I knew that nobody else was crazy enough to do it. And my team, some of them came down in there. a photographer came down and there Daniel Galisini and uh um but we were seven meters down. >> Whoa. >> In a in a in a trench that you could put your hands on all sides by the time we got to the bottom. You could see daylight up there. >> But we were way down. It was very scary. OSHA would have never allowed it. It was a hard hat situation for sure. And but we had a very stable angled huge uh Iron Age foundation above us. And so, um, but anyway, I was bound and determined to I I wasn't looking for skeletal remains, which we wound up finding an abundance of in this area, but again, churned into the matrix. By the way, that's human bone scatter in that area. >> Wow. And you don't know if those bones belong to the same person or not. >> Okay. In fact, we sent the best tooth selection because you want to get the denton in the teeth. If you can't get the petrus bone, you know, out of the ear, you can get, which is a good one for for getting DNA. Uh, but if you can get uh DNA out of Denton, that's good, too. We sent the teeth to the to the Harvard uh DNA lab, genetics lab, and they had it for about a year. This kind of going into COVID a little bit. So, uh uh they had it for a good long time, and they finally tested it and they said unfortunately the DNA was too heat degraded to read. Wow. Now, they didn't say anything to them other than it's too heat degraded. They knew heat they knew heat degradation. >> Did they Did they say how hot something had to be for that? No. Okay. >> No. So, we have no way of telling that. But it was too heat degraded. And so that's that we were Oh gosh, we were we disappointed. We want to see who our peeps were. Yeah. >> You know, who were these people? But anyway, um, Talmam has this um there's the there's the upper city. Here's the lower city in this area. Lower city may have gone out here. We have see that little wall right there. >> Yeah, >> we have a stray wall that goes out here and it's pretty substantial. So, it could have come all the way out. We do have a big village out here. >> So, um, the city could have actually come like that all the way to the Wadi over here >> which would have make it much bigger. And by the way, you find artifacts. These are these have all been bulldozed out flat for agricultural fields, but we they're full of artifacts. >> And um so in this area, remember this this area is 100 ft lower than this area. So we find almost no mud bricks from the middle bronze two period here. Almost none. The the the stone foundations are just denuted of their mud bricks. But right here we have that 100 foot high rampart. Now, that rampart does go all the way around, but I'm just showing you what's on the on the southwest to the to the south side. And then behind that on the lower tail and the upper tail, we find lots of preserved mud bricks. 10, 12, 20 courses of mud brick on the buildings. Why? Well, if you study this, you get the sense of directionality. They got shielded by the other ones >> that this is a more frontal blat part of the blast. This part back here is all shielded by this high upper city rampart. And so this is kind of deflecting uh the blast. >> The blast hits the rampart and pops up and so behind on the back. >> And by the way, when it does go uphill, the dynamics are that it increases in force. >> Sure. based based on the on the slope and the distance it increases that increases the force of the >> it compresses of the blast. Yeah, it compresses it. So anyway, uh it did shear off big walls up here, but um it it preserved we have a lot of mud brick down here all the way down to the lower city, but we it seems to only have mud brick behind this big rampart system. So, and then we came up with this the atypical proxies. And the atypical proxies are this, and I'll just note a couple of them. Uh, massive quantities of ash, way more than you would possibly find in a in an earthquake or in most kind of scenarios. You just don't find this. It's a deep mixed matrix, random fragments, bricks, burnt wood, plaster, pottery, objects, human bones, miscellaneous debris. It's all churned up. And all that debris is found through the entire thickness of the matrix. Only heavy objects on the floors. Um, another thing, evidence of post disintegration is virtually absent. Just don't you just don't see it. There's there the nature of the tail. They're both flat top. And so being sheared off like that, there's no slope remaining. By the way, if the palace sits like this up on a pedestal, they actually built it up. Engineered filled a platform to build the palace on. It's higher than what's to the east of it. If that palace, if this were natural, if this palace had been knocked down by an earthquake, it's mud bricks. Where would the mud brick detritus go as those over over the millennia as those mud bricks melted away? >> Downhill. >> Where would it go? It'd go downhill. >> Well, we excavated right below the palace and there's no mud brick detritus at all. >> What percentage of the of the upper part and the lower part have you would you say you've excavated? What percentage remains unexavated? Well, remember there's 13,000 6x6 meter squares on our grid about o over eight 16 seasons about 150 squares. >> Okay. >> So, well that's like like >> 5%. >> That's not even 1%. >> Oh, three. >> I mean, so it's a tenth of a percent. >> Now, that's a little bit misleading because that's that's standard for most excavations. It'd take you a thousand years to excavate the whole site and you wouldn't want to do that anyway because you want to leave substantial portions of it available for people in the future with better methods and technology. >> But as I said, most of the city on the on middle bronze city on the lower tail is is at the surface. So you can walk the whole city. We can map that whole part of the city because we see the tops of the buildings. So that was great. We can excavate in certain places, but other places it didn't take us much to excavate it. I mean, you get right from the surface under the surface 5 10 centimeters and you're on it or or it's sticking out of the surface and you don't have to excavate to it. You can see it and you can excavate it. So, um the upper city was different because it has two to three meters of Iron Age debris, Iron Age wall, four, it has four iron age strata. So, you got to excavate that and then you have to selectively remove sections of that in order to to get below it. So that becomes a little bit more complicated. But uh the upper tail we had um I would say maybe a 10 to 15% coverage um because it's skinny, it's long and thin, >> about 50 mters wide and about 300 meters long. So um we got a lot of it. We did lots of trenches. We did lots of probes. And we did a lot of probes on the old on the lower city, too. I mean, one season, uh, we sank, uh, we one by one meter probes. We had people just doing quick probes to see what was in this one area. And so these people are, I mean, they look they look like little uh, prairie dogs, you know, everybody's sitting in their little one by one meter and their heads are like this after after they got down. And it was pretty comical looking. But um so we did a some of that probing but we opened up some major areas temple area um domestic areas and uh but so much of it we were able to get a sense from the surface reads. We were able to get a sense of the layout of the city on the lower tail was easy. Upper tail not so much. It was much more difficult. The palace we got a great look at because we excavated good sections of it. Um other buildings we got some uh but the defensive system on both the upper and lower city we have terrific uh lots of exposure and lots of detailed excavation because what we we we just don't excavate something. We pay attention to the construction methodology the materials. We take samples of all the bricks of all the mortars of all the plasters of all the you know everything. You know, we have plaster of uh of many kinds, you know, mud plaster, lime plaster. So, you have to sample it. >> This is a huge job. This is a huge undertaking. >> Yeah. That's why we have a lab sitting over here full of stuff that's still being systematically analyzed. It takes a long time. So, um >> Wow. >> And uh so that was from the paper. This is the 1908 Tungusa uh event superimposed over the Kikar, the Jordan, the southern Jordan Valley with Talam over here. Say was did Jericho uh get get some collateral damage? We don't really know yet. Uh there's some suggestions that that might be the case, but for the most part, um this this is from the paper as well. This is a computer animation. Uh, this this takes this is one second. >> Oh, cool. This is an animation. One second. >> Now, it's going to take longer than that to play it. This is a super slow-mo >> play out of the air burst coming from the southwest. A 55 meter wide asteroid fragment at the altit exploding or going plasmic at about 653 m. That would be right over the north end of the Dead Sea. Um, at a releasing about 8.7 megat tons. That's several hundreds of times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb, which was measured in kilotons. >> Wow. Uh, and it's moving horizontally at 17 kilometers per second. So, this whole thing we're going to play out right here is probably less than a second. So, here it comes. If I can get it going here. Yeah, here we go. The red, of course, is the hot. Watch the ground. Watch the ground. >> There it is. >> You see some of the red showing up in places on the ground like here compresses >> here. So there's the palace. That's the upper tail palace. Here's the temple. Okay. So this uh that's a model temperatures are really high. The the horizontal velocities and forces and pressures are amazing. You're talking about 500,000 700,000 PSI forces. I mean that's enough to now you know why. Now you know how you shear off a 3 m thick mud brick wall. Shear it off. >> A massive explosion. And so um anyway, this is the paper people want to look it up. Uh it it is now appearing in science open and um so uh here here it is and some terrific people. Now I got talked into being on the second version. after it got pulled from the other site um several papers were put together with because there was a lot more analysis that was done since the first publication. So for this publication it has a lot more evidence and um has some other papers worked into it which is so it's a really it's a big paper. So there it is. People want to want to look at it. >> That's amazing. That's that. Gosh, that's incredible. Want to look at some stuff? >> Yes. Let's look at >> Do you have a story about the counting house that I that I heard with >> Oh, yeah. >> It's something in the same area. >> That was really >> It's not related maybe. I mean, this was a I mean, this this is one of those things that's it's kind of embarrassing for me because for um for 10 years, 10 seasons I said there there's no late Bronze Age at Talon. And we had excavated all across the site. everywhere. I mean, every sector we had done something significant and not one late bronze age pottery shirt to speak of. Not that there couldn't be some there, but there was no architecture for sure. There's no settlement. So, it was the late Bronze Gap. And I just, you know, the late Bronze Gap was a big deal to us. And and nobody lived there for from 1700 to 1,000 BC for seven centuries. And that was that. And all of a sudden, um, we're excavating in in a in a square on the upper city in LA. I mean, UA, so upper U, uh, A and, uh, 7 GG square. And we're getting some pottery. And it has a squiggly squiggly lines between two horizontal lines. And um that's that's a that's a perfectly good middle bronze age motif and I so we keep seeing this stuff and I'm seeing it and I'm but I'm getting a little uncomfortable. Now remember I've been telling people for 10 years or more there's no late Bronze Age stuff at Talon. >> It's the gap. >> It's a gap. >> Yeah. And um by the way, we're excavating down through one of the nastiest burn burned buildings I've ever seen in my in my in my career. I mean, it had 25 30 se cedar uh centimeter wood beams, probably cedar, Lebanon cedar. I mean, just burned charred. I mean, it was a it was literally like this. It was a It was a pile of mud bricks. A pile of bricks about meter high about 6 8 m 10 mters in diameter and it was high in the middle and it trailed off to the outside and all you had on the edges was a little skiff of ash that just disappeared. And then we started to find architecture associated with it. And I'm thinking this has to be the upper part of the middle bronze age palace. A story or a piece of it that didn't collapse or didn't get blown away. And I'm and I keep thinking this and I keep thinking this, but I'm looking and I know over here couple meters lower. I know that's the middle bronze palace. I'm looking at it. I know what's down there. What's this up here? And I'm I'm draw for for for our assistant director. I'm drawing all kinds of scenarios, right? This is a pancaking, right? We have a floor, the whole thing being knocked over and it's coming down like this. And so we've got a preserved upper story that's landing on a lower story moving in that, you know, in direction. I'm trying to explain it. How do we get this? >> And I'm looking at this pottery day after day. I'm going I think that this is well and then and then um one of our uh associates Duke ex excavates a biconical crater. It's in there in the lab. It's like that with vertical squiggly registers on it. And I I know this this classic late bronze 2. It's classic LB2. So I'm looking at all this stuff and I'm going this is not this is not MB. It's classic LB2. This is an LB2 building. And I'm thinking what am I going to tell the kids? And so I'm scrambling in my head thinking I've been telling the whole world there's no late Bronze Age of Talam and there is no settlement. Sure, but there's this building and it's maybe 10 m by 10 meters. Lane Ripmar just drew it up. I gota look at the drawing, but it's it's it's a substantial building and it's not domestic. It's too beefy to be domestic. It's got these big wood beams. It's got big lentil I mean big wooden lentils. It's not This is not domestic architecture. It has balance uh bronze balance scale pans and weights and furniture found carbonized table chairs um amulets, pieces of jewelry, and I'm thinking, what is this building? Well, then I'm thinking, okay, just go back in your files, in your head. What is this? This is the late Bronze 2 period. The late Bronze one period, the early late Bronze 2 period is known as the time of Egyptian occupation of Canaan. This is the time that the Egyptians were in the 18th dynasty were dominating this region, controlling it, and they had across the region Egyptian governors, toll houses, and troops associated with these various locations. And what did we find just about a 100 meters to the northeast down middle of the tail? A beautiful piece of of wool scale armor. Bronze ribbed scales sewn to a beautiful wool garment. >> What does that tell us? >> It's Egyptian scale armor. Oh, 100%. It's Egyptian, late Bronze Age Egyptian scale armor. Somebody left it there. And it was found right kind of in the interface between the MB and the Iron Age. Kind of right there in that interface, right on the top of the MB layer. And so we have that. And so now we got to make sense of it. Well, then I started going back to the Bible. Now, we know that Moses and Joshua brought the Israelites to Talam. I mean, there's nothing there. Whole area was destroyed. And because this we're talking about 14th century BC, there's nothing there. But yet, we know they're there with all the Israelites, the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant and all that. And so now um I'm I'm having to talk to my military people and I got a lot of them archaeologists who were in in the Marines and Okay, let's talk let's think military guys. Okay, military guys comment if you saw a building by the way we now think is built by the Egyptians to collect tolls and taxes. Why? because there are five or six major trade routes that intersect at Tal Hamom. You can go any direction from there. And it's an important place. Even though the all the cities are destroyed, burned out ruins, it's still a key location because if you want to go east to west to the coast, you got to go across this area. This is the fords of the Jordan. This is the This is where the Israelites are going to cross over into the promised land from here. And they're camping in the plains of Moab, which everybody says is the area of Talmam. Abel, Shhatim, Abel, remember Abel, place of mourning and Shhatim, acacas. Now it's the place of mourning, but where there are acacia trees, trees are starting to grow, >> the thorny ones, which can't be eaten, you know, by very many grazing animals, and so they can survive. But here we have Abel Shhatim. And so Moses and the Israelites are camping here. But if you look carefully at the scriptures associated with this encampment, it says that Moses and Joshua and the Israelites camped along the Jordan from Beth Yeshimote to Abelim. And just one time Beshimote is mentioned. Well, yes means wilderness, uninhabited area. And in that same time frame, you remember Balum who was asked to spy out the Israelites and rat on them, uh was up on Mount Pisg, which is Mount Nebo, just up to the south southsoutheast of Talam. And he says he he took a position at Pis where Pisga overlooks the Yeseshimon, the wasteland. Well, this place it says the Israelites came from B Yeseshimote feminine plural to Abel Shhatim. Well, all scholars identify Talam as the location of Abel Shhatim where Moses and Joshua camp. I didn't make that identification. Everybody else did. Um, it's no-brainer because Abel is on the Egyptian map list. We talked about Egyptian map list. Abel is this is where it is now. But what about Beeshimote? Be Yes means the house. Yes. The feminine plural of Yeseshimon, which is wilderness, means desolation. Desolation. It's the house of desolation. Now wait a minute. I'm thinking if you were a tourist caravanner coming through this area in this time frame and the Egyptians had built a customs house to take taxes and charge you for the road use as you pass by. Also, they got troops up there. They can check on you, but it's a money-making operation. And so, if there's this house up there, fairly nice one, built on top of a pile of ruins, burned out ruins. Might you give it the nickname the house of the desolation? It's the only house in the entire area. Burned out ruin there. there. Over there, another burned out ruin here. And this house, really nice one, is sitting up there plainly with a white plaster sitting right on top of a burned out ruin. Might you just call it the house of desolation? >> Sure. >> Desolation house. >> Yeah. >> And so I'm still I'm thinking, wait a minute. This is bait Yeshimo. Maybe it's not a place. It's a literal house. And I think that I mean I can't prove it but logically if they camped from B Yeseshimote to Abel Shhatim Abel Shhatim would be the lower city in the outlying area where it's easy to camp and you got water and everything down there. But wait a minute if Moses and Joshua and I go back to my military guys. If you came on to a site up the hill, oh, as a military man, >> where do you want your command camp? >> I want a place where I can see 360. >> Yeah. >> You don't, you know, it's the late Bronze Age. You're not worrying about snipers in the hills, right? >> Nobody's going to hit you from any direction. You want a place where you can see everybody. And all of a sudden, they get up to the top of this this most strategic pinnacle in the whole area. And lo and behold, there's a house. It's got water jars full of water, jars full of grain. It's got some ovens. It's got every It's got all the nicities of home. If you're a military commander like Moses or like Joshua and you see this thing, and by the way, all the Israelite army, they've been knocking people off left and right coming up the Trans Jordan, you think the guys in that house are going to stand them, stand them, try to stand off? No. No. What are they going to do? >> Run. >> Before they ever got up the hill, they boogied and they were gone. Wherever they went, they were gone. So, all of a sudden, Moses and Joshua come up there and they go, "Hey, that's pretty nice house." What if you were a military commander here? What would you do? >> Can't sleep there. >> You'd make it a base. >> You'd co-opt that house. That's right. >> As your command house. And so I think Moses and Joshua walk in and they look around. >> And Moses says, "I'll take this bedroom. Josh, you take that bedroom. You know who else?" You know, I'm sleeping and you guys sleep under the stars. You got tents. You know, we're we're military guys. But hey, you know, this is uh it's kind of nice for a change. And there's a table and there's chairs. Where did Moses write the book of Deuteronomy? There. It says he wrote it there while they were on the plains of Moab. Well, if you had a desk and a table and you got to write a document, do you suppose he had rolled out his parchment on the table and sat in a chair and written the book of Deuteronomy inside that building? I can't prove that. Well, that's a wild-haired specul. No, it's not. It's not crazy speculation. It's the house. >> It's putting puzzle pieces >> of the desolation. And this is where they were. Everybody knows that. >> Well, and it was there at the time that they came through. Why wouldn't they have used it? Now, it's also burned to a crisp and in it's in a heap of ruins. Here's what I think happened. Remember there were there were people who had experienced the trans Jordan in the amongst the Israelites and they said you know the half tribe of Ephraim and Manasseh and Reuben and Gad. They said they wanted to stay on this side of the river. They had a bunch of people said we like it over here. I don't know about over there but we have experience over here. We like can we stay here? We'll build a life over here. And Moses said, 'Well, yeah, you can leave your women and children over here. You guys can hang out wherever you want, but your fighting men are coming with me. When all the fighting's over over there after we've subdued the land, then you can come back, but not until you're not going to leave. You're not going to hang out over here leading the life of Riley while we're over there dying. So, you come with us. And that's what they did. Now, do you think and I'm not sure Moses had a mean streak or Joshua had a mean streak like this. Now, Moses died later and was buried in the valley, but Joshua took the people and crossed the river and the conquest begins. But I think as Joshua started down the hill and he looks up in this beautiful Egyptian toll house and he's thinking, "No, somebody else come in and use it. Might be our enemies. Burn it." I think he burned it. I think Joshua burned it to the ground. >> Man, that's an amazing story. That is incredible. >> Burned it to the ground and there it is burned to the ground but still has its balance scales >> chair >> as it's commercial grade architecture >> Egyptian armor >> in the Egyptian armor and the in the middle of nowhere. >> No settlements around nothing. Just controlling the intersections of the main trade routes in the region. So anyway, that's just kind of one of those flights of fancy if you want to call it that. But still, it's based on all solid reasoning. And and we excavated it, >> right? We excavated it. And the excavation, what it actually is, certainly is commensurate with, I mean, we're we will call it a customs house. It has what it needs to be a customs house. By the way, right across the river at Jericho is a similar building. The middle building at Jericho and the LB similar build, almost the same. >> So, the Egyptians built one over there. They built one here. It's connected in the route from going across the river. It's a no-brainer. Um, but what is it? Did Moses use it? I don't know. Did Joshua hang out there? I don't know. But, um, if I'd have been him, I would have. >> If that building was there, I would have. Now, it's possible they walked up and it's already burned. Maybe the Egyptians said, "Well, if we can't use it, nobody's gonna use it. Torch it." Maybe. I don't know. >> But it's fun to think. >> But it's fun to think. >> Love a hot take. >> Yeah. >> Steve, this has been great. I think we got to cut it here so we can go look at some some pottery shirts. Thank you for spending so much time with us and thank you for all the work that you've been doing. I mean, >> yeah, >> 35 years in in 16 digs. I mean, >> this is some this is serious. >> Thanks for staying passionate about it so the rest of us can learn. I appreciate you being passionate about it cuz we need people that go all the way down to the details, stay true to the science, and then report back on it. It's it's really incredible. >> Nobody's going to stay on a project of this magnitude unless you're passionate >> cuz it it beats the crap out of you is what it I mean, it just it just it's there every day, every morning, every I mean, every it's always there. There's always something else to do. There's always money to raise. There's always something to analyze. There's always there's always a radiocarbon, you know, a $10,000 radiocarbon testing bill to pay. I mean, it's it's just nonstop. Nonstop. >> So, >> it's incredible. >> Yeah. >> Thank you for doing this. >> Yeah. Thanks for letting us come and admire. >> You're welcome. >> You're welcome. It's fun to just rattle on and off. Yeah. >> All right, let's look at some pottery. >> Yep. >> Cool. Thanks, everybody.