Sodom

I missed the announcements last year, but there's a claim that the largest Bronze Age city of the era, buried in Tall el-Hammam is what's left of Sodom. Whatever it was, it was certainly a major player in the region--nothing else is that big or well-fortified. And there's some evidence of intense heat, and a destruction time in the range of 1750-1650BC.

It is fascinating to read the arguments of the scholars, a few of whom are Bishop Usher followers.. My takeaway from the last link is that trying to tease out critical background details from stories focussed on other things can be fraught, and that parsing out old names isn't reliable. And that there's some bitterness between groups of scholars.

A little extra platinum in the area suggests a air-burst meteor, though something volcanic or even a natural gas burst would also be possible. I look forward to hearing more about this. If it wasn't Sodom, it was a hitherto unreported culture.