Qumran textiles are herein no exception, although there are differences that mirror the character of the site.
our first paper on Qumran textiles was one that had to do with the final identification of what threads had been used and what dyes to color them.
At the start, I received answers like "this could be linen, perhaps ramie and it could also be wool" That such an answer is not very encouraging, to say the least, was also the reason why we started to focus on a technique that could show us what a thread really was: wool, cotton, hennep, linnen or ramie. Every different yarn would tell us something about Qumran, because, for example, cotton should not be there since it was as atextile imported by Arabs in the 7th century A.D., whereas wool could not have served as a wrapper for parchment, since a manuiscrpt with holy text was covered by linen according to Halachic Jewish rules.
We soon found out that a microscope and even an electronis scanning microscope (SEM) was insufficient to determine with accuracy what a yarn (thread) was. The latter will be illustrated by some SEM photos as they are obtained from Manolis Pantos at the Daresbury synchrotron facility in the UK.
Sample of colored linen No. QUM510
The results were published by M. Mueller, M.Z.Papiz, D.T.Clarke,M.A.Roberts,B. M.Murphy, M.Burghammer, C.Riekel, E.Pantos, and J.Gunneweg in 2003, "Identification of the textiles from Khirbet Qumran using microscopy and synchrotron radiation x-ray fibre diffraction" In: J-B Humbert and J.Gunneweg (editors), Archaeological Excavations at Khirbet Qumran and Ain Feshka - Studies in Archaeometry and Anthropology, volume II, chapter XII, pages 177-186. Presses Universitaires de Fribourg (Suisse), and http://srs.dl.ac.uk/arch/publications/qumran-textiles-micro-xrd.pdf.