Cultural Analysis: Scientists think that X-ray fluorescence could identify the geographical origin of these ancient texts.
My daughter is a member of the society which produces this journal. I’ll have to ask her how accurate it is.
An X-ray fluorescence analytical technique may help scholars settle a decades-long archaeological debate: Were the multitude of Dead Sea Scroll texts written near the Dead Sea or just stored in caves nearby? This technique could provide an answer without harming the valuable Hebrew documents that have been degrading rapidly since their discovery in the 1940s and 50s, its developers say. The debate over the Scrolls’ origins has filled “books and books,” because they mark an important milestone in Jewish history, says Ioanna Mantouvalou, a physicist at Berlin’s Technical University, in Germany. But scholars have been understandably unwilling to resolve the debate with destructive scientific techniques, she adds. Mantouvalou and her colleagues, including Ira Rabin at Germany’s Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing in Berlin, developed a non-invasive technique to determine the origin of the parchment on which most of the Scrolls were written.
Zwinglius Redivivus 