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

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. Earlier, it was shown that the standard AAA pretreatment procedure used in the 2 previous studies dating Dead Sea Scroll samples 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.

A Bottom-up Approach to Environmental Cost-Benefit Analysis

Cost-Benefit Analysis is a method to assess the effects of policies and projects on social welfare. CBAs are usually applied in a top-down approach, in the sense that a decision-making body first decides on which policies or projects are to be considered, and then applies a set of uniform criteria to identifying and valuing relevant cost and benefit flows. This paper investigates the possible advantages, prerequisites and limitations of applying CBA in what may be considered an alternative, “bottom-up” manner. Instead of starting out with a pre-defined policy option, the suggested approach begins with the underlying environmental problem, and then assesses costs and benefits of strategies and solutions as identified by local and directly affected stakeholders. For empirical case studies concerning two river catchments in Sweden and Latvia, the bottom-up CBA approach utilises local knowledge, assesses plans which are not only developed for local conditions but are also likely to be more acceptable to local society, and sheds additional light on possible distributional effects. By not only benefitting from, but also supporting participatory environmental planning, bottom-up CBA is in line with the growing trend of embedding stakeholder participation within environmental policy and decision-making