The Temple Scroll: Reconstructing an ancient manufacturing practice.

The miraculously preserved 2000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient texts of invaluable historical significance, were discovered in the mid-20th century in the caves of the Judean desert. The texts were mainly written on parchment and exhibit vast diversity in their states of preservation. One particular scroll, the 8-m-long Temple Scroll is especially notable because of its exceptional thinness and bright ivory color.

The Egmont Master phenomenon: X-ray fluorescence spectrometric and paper studies for art history research.

The aim of the research project "Typology of Dutch Drawing" was to establish an interdisciplinary approach for investigating heterogeneous drawing collections. To define a type common to a group of drawings, we determine elements that are common to them based on style and the use of identical materials. To that end, we investigated about 750 Dutch drawings from the sixteenth century at the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett using art historical and scientific methods.

A study of degradation of historic parchment using small-angle X-ray scattering, synchrotron-IR and multivariate data analysis.

Parchment has been in use for thousands of years and has been used as the writing or drawing support for many important historic works. A variety of analytical techniques is currently used for routine assessment of the degree of denaturation of historic parchment; however, because parchment has a heterogeneous nature, analytical methods with high spatial resolution are desirable. In this work, the use of small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and synchrotron-IR (SR-IR) was examined in conjunction with multivariate data analysis to study degradation of an extended set of historic parchment samples, and particularly to investigate the effect of lipids and the presence of iron gall ink on the degradation processes.

Provenance studies on Dead Sea scrolls parchment by means of quantitative micro-XRF.

In this study, we address the question of the provenance and origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts. A characteristic low ratio of chlorine to bromine, corresponding to that of the Dead Sea water, may serve as an indicator for local production. For this aim we developed a non-destructive procedure to determine the Cl/Br ratio in the parchment of these manuscripts.

3D micro-XRF for cultural heritage objects: new analysis strategies for the investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A combination of 3D micro X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (3D micro-XRF) and micro-XRF was utilized for the investigation of a small collection of highly heterogeneous, partly degraded Dead Sea Scroll parchment samples from known excavation sites. The quantitative combination of the two techniques proves to be suitable for the identification of reliable marker elements which may be used for classification and provenance studies. With 3D micro-XRF, the three-dimensional nature, i.