Closer Look at Ancient DocumentsTechnical details of the work follow. Bruce's team does not seem to have identified new fragments of specific, known texts yet, but the work is still at an early stage.
Written by Lauren Walser - USC (Imperial Valley News)
Wednesday, 03 December 2008
Los Angeles, California - It feels impolite to call them “small dinky things” or “smashed mushrooms.” But researchers in the USC archaeology labs said as much. And pressed onto a piece of glass while undergoing intense photography, those descriptions do not seem far off.
Technically, they’re called Dead Sea Scrolls. And for a single day in November, researchers in the USC Archaeological Research Center had five “dinky” fragments of the scrolls in their hands. But the researchers saw this day as more than just a chance to unlock new clues to these ancient texts. It was an opportunity to test out some of the most high-tech equipment in the field using techniques only available in their labs at USC.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have long been artifacts of intense scholarly and public interest – as well as heated debate. In 1947, young Bedouin shepherds stumbled upon a cave full of jars containing ancient scrolls. This discovery led to an ongoing search that has produced thousands of tiny fragments of biblical and early Jewish documents, dated from the third century BCE (before the common era) to the second century C.E. – including documents nearly a thousand years older than any other surviving manuscript of the Hebrew Scriptures.
It’s a rare opportunity for scholars to have these documents available to them, but the researchers in the Archaeological Center have been working with these scrolls for more than 20 years – longer than any other group of scholars.
“If someone wants the best images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, they know to come to us,” said Bruce Zuckerman, USC College professor of religion and director of the USC West Semitic Research Project and the Archaeological Research Center.
And this time around, new photographic equipment made their acquisition of Dead Sea Scroll fragments all the more exciting.
“What we especially wanted to do this time was see if this equipment would work the way we expected it to,” Zuckerman said. “It wasn’t certain that this would be the case. No one had ever tried these techniques before.”
But their results were astounding. “The images we captured are far better than anything we’ve ever seen before,” Zuckerman said. “We were able to pick up details we didn’t expect to see.”
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UPDATE: More on Professor Zuckerman here.