How do archaeologists know when to stop digging? Couldn’t there be many more dead sea scrolls if they just keep digging up more of the area?
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Funding and regulations also play a part. Most countries have a limit on how deep you can dig.
I actually know a woman who works on the Dead Sea scroll digs. She’s one of very few experts on the Dead Sea scrolls in the US (might be the only one? I’m not sure). The Dead Sea scrolls are kind of a special case when it comes to archaeological digs because there are looters in the area who are after all the same artifacts that the archaeological teams are looking for. There’s literally a race to find the Dead Sea scrolls because whatever the archaeologists don’t protect, the looters will sell on the black market. It’s some Indiana Jones shit.
Edit: here’s an article about it https://jewishjournal.com/news/334372/in-israel-archaeologists-and-looters-race-to-acquire-a-piece-of-history/
2020 was bad enough, can we please not cause a second impact and start the human instrumentality project? Pretty please?
They didn’t “dig up” the Dead Sea Scrolls, they were sitting in a cave high on a mountain. They were found between 1947 and 1956 by local Bedouin in the caves of **Qumran**, about 20 km east of Jerusalem.
I worked with a professor that would help explore caves in the deserts of the Middle East. He would use a pull behind sonar device that would help determine if there were objects below the sand. Technology is good enough that you don’t necessarily need to dig to find out if something is there.
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