As I hoped in a recent post, I was able to attend Randall Price’s session at the annual Near East Archaeological Society meeting (a sub-session at the Evangelical Theological Society meeting) this past week in San Francisco. The session was entitled, “Report of the 2011 Ark Search LLC Expedition and Excavation on Mt. Ararat.” I’m happy to say it was an interesting and informative session. I went wanting to hear two things. First, I wanted to actually hear Price distance himself from the Chinese ark investigation hoax.  I had previously posted a letter on this blog from Dr. Price disavowing the nonsense. You can find that letter here on Dr. Price’s website (and other items investigating the hoax). I just wanted to hear him say it in a room filled with many people predisposed to wanting the ark found. He did so, very clearly. He did the same when I briefly chatted with him later in the conference. Second, I wanted to know if he had read the recent critique of the bogus Carbon-14 testing that I linked readers to in this earlier post. He actually brought up the article before Q & A time, so I know he read it. He also agreed with its findings, which I was glad to hear.

My general impression of Price’s session is that he and his team are making a serious attempt to understand a large anomalous form under the ice that they have detected with ground-penetrating radar (the tests were performed by people expert in that technology, one of whom has a PhD in geology). The audience saw a number of slides from the data read-out that indeed showed an anomalous rectangular space or object. I can’t actually say more than that since some of the information (legitimately) ought not be discussed on the web due to legalities surrounding permits from the Turkish government (i.e., what the team was allowed to do and not allowed to do – I don’t want to mis-characterize anything I heard and make it hard for Price’s team to get permits next year). I can say that nothing even close to conclusive was found. It’s basically going to take permission to dig or drill into the object, and then proper testing of any material remains. I don’t say this sarcastically, but good luck with that. There are many physical and legal obstacles to even getting anything to test. That’s just the way it is.

There was only one negative aspect of the presentation for me. We really *can* do without all the Indiana Jones-ish storytelling. It amounts to hype and detracts from being taken seriously. There wasn’t a lot of that, but any of it is too much.

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