Dogs and Chickens at Qumran

Sixty years after their discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls are now fully published and have been accessible to the public for years. Unfortunately, the material from Roland de Vaux’s excavations at Qumran remains unpublished and inaccessible. During the last decade we have witnessed a spate of alternative archaeological interpretations of the site of Qumran, most prominently those identifying it as a manor house (Yizhar Hirschfeld) or a pottery production center (Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg). In this paper I survey the current state of Qumran archaeology, including a consideration of the alternative interpretations and the larger trends that are defining the ongoing debates.