The dating of the textiles found at Qumran started with Libby himself who received a large piece of textile, rumours are that he got 85 cm wide piece of cloth, in order to date the material according to its Carbon 14 content.
Since then, many singular C14 dates have been obtained of pieces of textile. However, Lately, in 2002, J. van der Plicht in Groningen found out that the Qumran textiles had been treated with beeswax or parafin and that therefore the textiles have been contaminated and the obtained dates have been considered to be wrong.




Thirty samples of Textiles found in the cemetery, the settlement and the in the caves have been send to the Royal Museum of Denmark to be cleaned from their contaminant that now--as de Vaux has reported earlier--have been impregnated with parafin to preserve them.
After the cleaning that will take half a year, the samples are send to the Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AAS) laboratory at Groningen University where they are dated for C14. The experienced standard deviations for the absolute dates are promised to be low so that we will have a definitive date for some of the textiles that are connected with the finds in the caves and the settlement in whose context they were found.
This means that in the beginning of 2003, we will have a set of dates which will hopefully give us dates for caves and a locus in the settlement