Trinity Southwest University’s Dean of Archaeology Steven Collins told host of the Rosenberg Report, Joel C. Rosenberg, that he and his team believe the Tell el-Hammam site in Jordan appears to have many of the markers of Sodom. The site is reportedly scattered with Bronze-age remains that appear to have been melted in a “flash heat” situation, matching the Biblical account of how Sodom burned to the ground.

“As soon as we get a few centimeters into that [Bronze Age] matrix, this piece of pottery, the shoulder of a storage jar, is facing up at us. And it looks like it’s glazed,” Collins told Rosenberg. Another member of Collins’ team remarked that the scars looked similar to those witnessed at the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was detonated.

[Maybe? I’m always skeptical of such claims until others confirm them, because a number of such claims have turned out to be erroneous, driven more by desire than evidence. Trinity Southwest University is an unaccredited evangelical school, which has refused to submit to accreditation for religious reasons. That’s certainly a fair choice, especially given how political accreditation has become of late, but it also prompts the question of how “faith based” their archeology is, and whether they’re reverse engineering evidence to the scriptures rather than let the evidence emerge independent of faith. Further research could answer that question. — Ed]