Ongoing Research and Analysis

Research has continued during the three years since survey funded through this project was completed. Many more material samples have been collected from Tall el-Hammam during the annual excavation seasons, and results from the annalysis of these materials continues to support the hypothesis that a meteoritic airburst event was the cause behind the destruction of occupied settlements across the circular plain immediately north of the Dead Sea. Carbon-14 tests have affirmed the initial estimate through pottery analysis that the destruction occured near the end of the second half of the Middle Bronze Age (MB2) ca. 1700 BC +/- 30 years. My research associates and I are in the process of writing a paper for publication in a scientific journal, hopefully in 2020.

I am actually writing this update from Jordan during Season 15 (2020) of the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project (TeHEP). Once again, I am on a mission to discover more supporting evidence for the airburst theory while the rest of the TeHEP team excavates this large and wonderful site collecting information about the culture that once occupied it. Please allow me to encourage you to experience excavating an ancient site by visiting our website (tallelhammam.com) and register to join us for our 2021 dig season. At least scroll to the bottom and sign up for our Updates from the field.

There has been no progress in the follow-up coring project that I mentioned in my project report. The estimated cost of $500,000 has thus far been prohibitive. Of course, this was just a single cost estimate and not a serious quote or business proposal. If a serious backer were to contact me, however, I would certainly do diligence by developing a detailed project plan with my research colleagues and soliciting at least three quotations. Needless to say, the cost of this project is outside the scope of Experiment.com, so this is not something I could do by crowd funding here.

I presented a paper in November 2018 at the Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) that created quite a stir in a number of magazines and other media outlets. That paper, "The 3.7kaBP Event" is available for download on Academia.edu. Contact me with your email address if you want a list of articles, interviews, and YouTube blogs that were spawned by that presentation.