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Reply to Israel Carmi (2002): “Are the 14C Dates of the Dead Sea Scrolls Affected by Castor Oil Contamination?”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

Kaare L Rasmussen ,
Johannes van der Plicht ,
Gregory Doudna ,
Frank M Cross  and
John Strugnell
Kaare L Rasmussen*
Affiliation:
Chemistry Department, 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.
Gregory Doudna
Affiliation:
The Danish Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Vimmelskaftet 41A, 2, Copenhagen K, DK-1161, Denmark.
Frank M Cross
Affiliation:
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, 6 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Massachu setts 02138, USA.
John Strugnell
Affiliation:
The Divinity School, Harvard University, 45 Francis Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected].
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Carmi (2002) is a response to our study published in Radiocarbon 43(1) by Rasmussen et al. (2001). We noted widespread possible exposure to castor oil of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) in the Rockefeller Museum in the 1950s and reported experiments showing that the AAA pretreatment used in the first 2 series of radiocarbon datings of the DSS (Bonani et al. [1992] and Jull et al. [1995]), “cannot be guaranteed to have removed all of the modern carbon in any samples if they had been contaminated with castor oil and hence could have produced some 14C dates that were younger than the texts' true ages.” Carmi, a coauthor of the Bonani et al. (1992) study, criticizes our analysis on 4 grounds:

Type
Notes & Comments
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , 2003 , pp. 497 - 499
Copyright
Copyright © The Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

References

Bonani, G, Ivy, S, Wölfli, W, Broshi, M, Carmi, I, Strugnell, J. 1992. Radiocarbon dating of fourteen Dead Sea Scrolls. Radiocarbon 34(3):843–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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