A View from the Caves: Who put the scrolls in there?

Crawford discusses the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered in 11 caves in the Judean Desert near a site known as Khirbet Qumran, or the ruins of Qumran. Pere Roland de Vaux of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, who excavated the site in the 1950s, concluded that Qumran was a Jewish sectarian settlement, most probably Essene (the other two main Jewish movements in the Greco-Roman period being Pharisees and Sadducees). De Vaux said that the Essenes from from Qumran, who owned the scrolls, hid them in the caves during the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome (66-73 C.E.) because the settlement was threatened by an advancing Roman Legion, which indeed destroyed the site in 68 CE. A significant number of scholars, however, oppose this so-called Essene-Qumran hypothesis. They all agree that Qumran was not a sectarian settlement and that the manuscripts found in the caves are not related to Qumran.