12-17-2004, 03:19 PM
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#1
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Contributor
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
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Latest theories on Qumran - a small pottery factory
A crack in the theory
Quote:
Ten years after beginning their own study of the site's structures, under the auspices of the Judea and Samaria Civil Administration, Magen, staff officer of archeology, and Peleg, district archeologist for east Samaria and the Jordan Valley, and their crew excavated their way down the steps of the site's last and largest pool yet to be uncovered.
State-sponsored archeologists, they are among the renegades in the world of archeology: they have long been skeptical of prevailing theories that most of the pools were mikvaot and that the site was ever home to a monastic sect who penned the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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Though none of their findings have been released, a few early news reports in the Israeli and American media have charged Magen and Peleg with trying to prove that the Essenes did not write the Dead Sea Scrolls and that the Essenes were not ascetic but affluent.
An exclusive copy of the report's 22-page summary obtained by The Jerusalem Post shows that many rumors are off-base. The archeologists' work does not describe the Essene lifestyle nor disprove their relationship to the scrolls.
Peleg and Magen sat with the Post to go through all the points of their 110-page research paper, to be published this spring by Brown University archeologist Katharina Galor with Brill Academic Publishers, as part of a compendium on Qumran theories.
The report doesn't comment much on the Essenes, it turns out, because no ascetics, including the Essenes, lived at Qumran, it says. The report also proposes a new theory on the structures and activities of the Qumran inhabitants that does not include copying religious texts or observing religious ceremonial rites. The authors maintain that they have disproved the site's connection to the scrolls and to the Essenes; and that this finding will reflect on the scrolls and perhaps on Second Temple Jewish history itself.
AFTER 10 years of work at Qumran, when Magen and Peleg's crew reached the bottom layer of the large pool, they were stunned to uncover a previously unseen white sediment. The powder has turned out to be the most significant clue yet to the Qumran mystery, they say.
"It was the most important thing ever found at Qumran: the bottom of the pool has some three tons of high-quality clay," Peleg told the Post. "We started to understand the site - there were no Essenes."
Qumran in the Second Temple period was not much more than a small, dusty, muddy, and smoky pottery-industry work station, devoid of spirituality, according to the clay sediment in conjunction with their other findings, he says.
The finding of "buckets and buckets" of burned dates also led the archeologists to confirm that the only other activity going on at Qumran was the production of date honey, stored in small ceramic vessels made there.
Initially, to check that the powder was indeed viable clay, the archeologists threw the fine chalk-colored residue into a vat and added water. Then they delivered the clay to a potter and asked her to fire away. The potter gave the clay a quick thumbs-up. Her first vase adorns Magen's Jerusalem office, together with dozens of handmade drawings of Qumran artifacts.
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