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Originally Posted by Wormius
Are you concerned that scholars are giving forgers ideas of how to counterfeit more authentically, or do they simply not have the tools to be able to evade detection? Or were the counterfeits done long ago when detection methods were primitive? I imagine with the amount of money behind this, they would be investing some money into forging better.
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This is always a concern. The physicist that I worked with in Germany was extremely reluctant to publish any of our findings because of of this. I tend to think that the publicity is a risk worth taking, mostly for the amount of exposure it creates for this issue.
I am uncertain about when the forgeries were manufactured. There are reports of Bedouin attempting to sell fakes to the archaeologists who excavated the Qumran site back in the 1950s, and it is entirely reasonable to think that these were produced back then. By my way of thinking, even if scholars passed on purchasing forgeries as we are told, it seems likely that the forgers would not have simply given up, and would most likely have found a more gullible buyer. On the other hand, ALL of the forgeries have entered the market after 1993, and after the death of the antiquities dealer who brokered the sales of virtually all of the authentic Dead Sea Scrolls. It remains an open question, and I think it is also possible that there is more than one source for the fakes.
As for the question of technology, I also tend to think that several of the errors I have observed are virtually impossible to avoid. The problem for the forger is that he or she needs to use ancient material, and while it is possible to acquire small bits of ancient leather—it would need to pass C-14 tests. (As a side note, that attention whore Joel Baden said on the documentary that it is easy to purchase ancient uninscribed parchment on e-Bay; this is simply not true. While it is the case for papyrus, parchment was much less common in antiquity, and thus, finding any uninscribed scraps is exceedingly difficult. This is why almost all of the modern forgeries are actually made from ancient leather, NOT parchment.) Ancient leather is already so badly damaged and deformed that it makes for a completely unforgiving writing surface. Close inspection of the fragments reveals rather unambiguously the application of ink to already ancient and damaged materials. At one point in the documentary I was attempting to show how ink appears on damaged edges or delaminated portions of the fragment. The scale I was working on was 400x magnification, using a Keyence VHX-6000 3D digital microscope. I maintain that producing convincing script on an ancient fragment that can pass for authentic at that scale is virtually impossible. It would require working in micrometres, but with ancient tools and materials.