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The Effects of Possible Contamination on the Radiocarbon Dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls II: Empirical Methods to Remove Castor Oil and Suggestions for Redating

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

Kaare Lund Rasmussen ,
Johannes van der Plicht ,
Gregory Doudna ,
Frederik Nielsen ,
Peter Højrup ,
Erling Halfdan Stenby  and
Carl Th Pedersen
Kaare Lund Rasmussen*
Affiliation:
Institute of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark
Johannes van der Plicht
Affiliation:
Centrum voor Isotopen Onderzoek, Nijenborgh 4, 9747 AG Groningen, the Netherlands. Also: Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, the Netherlands
Gregory Doudna
Affiliation:
Columbia College, 13910 45th Avenue NE #802, Marysville, Washington 98271, USA
Frederik Nielsen
Affiliation:
Institute of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark
Peter Højrup
Affiliation:
Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark
Erling Halfdan Stenby
Affiliation:
Dept. of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
Carl Th Pedersen
Affiliation:
Institute of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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While kept at the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, many Dead Sea Scroll fragments were exposed to castor oil by the original team of editors in the course of cleaning the parchments. Castor oil must be regarded as a serious contaminant in relation to radiocarbon dating. If modern castor oil is present and is not removed prior to dating, the 14C dates will be skewed artificially towards modern values. In Rasmussen et al. (2001), it was shown that the standard AAA pretreatment procedure used in the 2 previous studies dating Dead Sea Scroll samples (Bonani et al. 1992; Jull et al. 1995) is not capable of removing castor oil from parchment samples. In the present work, we show that it is unlikely that castor oil reacts with the amino acids of the parchment proteins, a finding which leaves open the possibility of devising a cleaning method that can effectively remove castor oil. We then present 3 different pretreatment protocols designed to effectively remove castor oil from parchment samples. These involve 3 different cleaning techniques: extraction with supercritical CO2, ultrasound cleaning, and Soxhlet extraction—each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Our data show that the protocol involving Soxhlet extraction is the best suited for the purpose of decontaminating the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we recommend that this protocol be used in further attempts to 14C date the Dead Sea Scrolls. If such an attempt is decided on by the proper authorities, we propose a list of Scroll texts, which we suggest be redated in order to validate the 14C dates done earlier by Bonani et al. (1992) and Jull et al. (1995).

Type
Methods and Developments
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , 2009 , pp. 1005 - 1022
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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