Documentary details dead sea scrolls project
By KATE NAGENGAST
Associate News Editor
The Discovery Channel recently televised a documentary featuring research by three Notre Dame professors on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This project, shown Jan. 10, highlighted the work of Eugene Ulrich, an O'Brien Professor of Theology who began studying the scrolls more than 30 years ago; Susan Sheridan, an associate professor who specializes in forensic anthropology; and Mark Schurr, an assistant professor and archeologist who performed fluoride analysis to date the remains.
The documentary accented not only the scrolls themselves, but also the remains exhumed near the scrolls in the 1950s believed to represent some 20 individuals.
"I was very pleased with the documentary. It focused principally on the archaeological questions and chose the best of the archeologists for their perspectives," said Ulrich. "It was good to see Sheridan and Schurr featured prominently, because I know that Sheridan has been working long and hard and well on these issues, and it's good to see her get a few moments of well-deserved recognition."
This was not Sheridan's first exposure to documentary work. Previously interviewed by CNN's Science and Technology Week, Headline News and several other news broadcasts related to her work with police in forensic anthropology, Sheridan is a media veteran. Schurr, however, who was called in as a specialist to date the remains, was surprised by the extent of the editing process.
"It's surprising how much time they spend filming you — like five hours of taping to five minutes of film shown," said Schurr.
The documentary originated under Sterling Van Wagoner, the producer who contacted the Notre Dame professors last year because he had previously made a television documentary, for which Ulrich also interviewed, and The Discovery Channel was interested in both projects, said Ulrich.
"[Van Wagoner] was interested in educating the public on the recent breakthroughs regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls," Ulrich said. "The texts are now all published, and the main debates have returned to the archaeological issues."
Ulrich cited dilemmas such as: What was the nature and living arrangements of the building compound by the caves, and who was buried in the more than 1,000 graves in the adjacent cemetery?
There is fierce resistance on the part of some conservative Israelis against disturbing Jewish bones, so the graves cannot now be excavated, said Ulrich. However, Sheridan and Schurr were able to study a few skeletons that had been previously excavated and taken to France and Germany.
"It was interesting as I was looking at the remains because [Sheridan] wanted a radio carbon date but they were covered in wax," said Schurr. "It looked like they were in really bad shape, and we discovered there wasn't any carbon in them, that was a disappointment. But the fluoride dating actually worked well.
"I was called in as a specialist, a lot of stuff goes on in archeology and biological anthropology is so complicated now, it's so multi-disciplinary that no one person could do it," Schurr said. "So you have to bring in a lot of different people to accomplish your research. The fluoride dating was actually done by an undergraduate anthropology student, Angie Campbell, who graduated last year."
But Sheridan and Ulrich's work on the Dead Sea Scrolls began long before the excavation of these remains. Although Ulrich remembers first handing a 2,000-year-old manuscript in a musty museum basement workroom in Jerusalem, and when he was chosen for Chief Editor of the Qumran Biblical Scrolls, these are only a few of Ulrich's notable achievements in the field since he began work on the scrolls in 1971.
"My dissertation director, Professor Frank Cross at Harvard, was one of the two Americans on the original international team chosen to edit the scrolls," said Ulrich. "His biggest and most interesting Hebrew scroll (1-2 Samuel) required very sharp Greek because of its relationship to the historian Josephus. All of us students knew Greek, but I had been marinated in Latin and Greek, and so Cross put me on it. From then on, it has been an exciting ride."
Sheridan's research also continues.
"I have been working on a Byzantine monastic collection from Jerusalem for the past eight years," she said. "Almost one-third of the 15,000 or more bones we've exhumed are the remains of children. They will be the focus of our research this summer.
"I am also working on bones from a Late Bronze family tomb near Nabulus in the West Bank, and have begun a series of projects related to the genetics of ancient infectious disease on a large collection of Nubian mummies from Sudan," said Sheridan.
Ulrich is coeditor of "The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible," which presents the biblical manuscripts of the scrolls in English for the first time. Ulrich and colleague James Vanderkam, both O'Brien Professors of Theology at Notre Dame, are among the world's leading scholars of the scrolls.
Last year Ulrich was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation's leading learned society, and this year on his sabbatical he is preparing two books. One is a critical edition of Isaiah from Cave 1 (the only biblical scroll completely preserved); and the second is The Qumran Bible, the Hebrew text of all the biblical scrolls – the original texts from which the English Dead Sea Scrolls Bible was translated, he said.
All News Stories for Tuesday, January 29, 2002
