Archaeologists excavating Tell el-Hammam in Jordan have found the ruins of a massive Bronze Age city that seems to have mysteriously disappeared for 700 years. They believe it may be the city of Sodom, described in Genesis as having been destroyed by God in the time of Abraham:
“Tall el-Hammam seemed to match every Sodom criterion demanded by the text,” says [Steven Collins, the head of the excavation]. “Theorizing, on the basis of the Sodom texts, that Sodom was the largest of the kikkar (the Jordan “disk,” or “well-watered plain” [mentioned] in the biblical text [as the location of] cities east of the Jordan, I concluded that if one wanted to find Sodom, then one should look for the largest city on the eastern kikkar that existed during the Middle Bronze Age, [which would have been] the time of Abraham and Lot. When we explored the area, the choice of Tall el-Hammam as the site of Sodom was virtually a no-brainer, since it was at least five to ten times larger than all the other Bronze Age sites in the entire region.” . . .
[B]ased on the excavated evidence, the city’s Bronze Age heyday seems to have . . . come to a sudden, inexplicable end toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age—and the ancient city became a relative wasteland for 700 years, for the most part void of human habitation. The comparatively paltry presence or lack of Late Bronze Age material is a testament to this, with the same pattern shown in the smaller, nearby sites.
Read more on Popular Archaeology: http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/fall-2015/article/possible-site-of-ancient-sodom-yields-more-finds