TY - JOUR A1 - Rabin, Ira A1 - Kohl, Anka A1 - Bicchieri, M. A1 - Sodo, A. A1 - Piantanida, G. T1 - New results in Dead Sea Scrolls non-destructive characterisation. Evidence of different parchment manufacture in the fragments fromReed collection N2 - This work presents the non-destructive spectroscopic characterisation of original Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS)parchment fragments from Ronald Reed collection. The fragments are of paramount importance becausethey have never been subjected to any treatment of preservation and restoration, this allows to investi-gate the manufacturing method of real original Jewish parchments. The manufacture of “sacred” Jewishparchments, in fact, is traditionally supposed to use a superficial tannin treatment. To study the DSS frag-ments, it was necessary both to analyse mock-up samples, especially manufactured in order to reproduceancient Oriental Jewish ritual parchments, and to compare the results with those obtained in the analysisof modern and ancient Western Jewish ritual parchments, in order to test the effectiveness of the selectedspectroscopic techniques. Traditionally, the main difference between Oriental and Western traditionalparchment preparation consisted in the dehairing method: enzymatic for Oriental and lime-based forWestern. Moreover, a finishing treatment with tannin was supposed to be applied on ritual Jewish parch-ments. The need of reference samples derives from the knowledge that each parchment preparation,treatment and degradation can induce structural modifications that affect the spectral features. FourierTransform Infrared Spectroscopy by Attenuated Total Reflection (ATR-FTIR), FT-Raman and m-Ramanwere used in this study. The experimental results allowed us to recognise, with different sensitivity, thepresence of tannin by using m-Raman and IR spectroscopies and to prove that not all the archaeologicalsamples were manufactured in the same way with vegetal extracts. Many salts (tschermigite, dolomite,calcite, gypsum and iron carbonate) were found on the surface of DSS fragments. They can derive fromthe degradation processes and storage environment before the discovery or from the manufacture. More-over, the different sensitivities and instrumental characteristics of the used techniques permitted us toestablish an analytical protocol, useful for further studies of similar materials. KW - ATR-FTIR KW - Tannins KW - Dead Sea Scrolls KW - Raman KW - FT-Raman PY - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2018.01.014 VL - 32 SP - 22 EP - 29 PB - Elsevier Masson SAS AN - OPUS4-49533 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -