Revisiting Qumran Cave 1Q and its Archaeological Assemblage

Abstract

Qumran Cave 1Q was the first site of Dead Sea scroll discoveries. Found and partly emptied by local Bedouin, the cave was excavated officially in 1949 and published in the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (Volume 1) in 1955. Contents of the cave are found in collections worldwide, and in different institutions in Jerusalem and Amman. While the scrolls are the most highly prized artefacts from this cave, in archaeological terms they are part of an assemblage that needs to be understood holistically in order to make conclusions about its character and dating. This study presents all of the known items retrieved from the cave, including those that are currently lost, in order to consider what we might know about the cave prior to its emptying and the changes to its form. AbstractQumran Cave 1Q was the first site of Dead Sea scroll discoveries. Found and partly emptied by local Bedouin, the cave was excavated officially in 1949 and published in the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (Volume 1) in 1955. Contents of the cave are found in collections worldwide, and in different institutions in Jerusalem and Amman. While the scrolls are the most highly prized artefacts from this cave, in archaeological terms they are part of an assemblage that needs to be understood holistically in order to make conclusions about its character and dating. This study presents all of the known items retrieved from the cave, including those that are currently lost, in order to consider what we might know about the cave prior to its emptying and the changes to its form. It constitutes preliminary work done as part of the Leverhulme funded International Network for the Study of Dispersed Qumran Caves Artefacts and Archival Sources.

Palestine’s Syriac Orthodox community and the Dead Sea scrolls

“…The scrolls, and their story, has, however, been distorted, elements of it amplified out of all proportion, by the kind of ideological and emotional furore which surround many archaeological discoveries with Biblical links (Brodie and Kersel 2012). The focus on the Scrolls and their theological importance has, moreover, obscured much of the archaeological context, with non-documentary finds from the various caves often dispersed around the world and their significance for understanding the site lost; a recent project to trace these objects is one of the few scholarly enterprises which seems to take the Ta'amira Bedouin and their activities seriously, in the interests of reconstructing from various interviews and secondary accounts their exact activities in the 1940s and 50s (Taylor et al 2017).…”