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Re: orion-list Qumran skeletons/gender

Joe,
  Thanks for your comments on Haas and Steckoll. I think there are many
readers of Orion who don't have a ready grasp of the literature and the
issues with regard to the cemeteries and corpses and the assignment of
gender. It is the bailiwick of physical anthropologists, your specialty,
and that of G. Kurth, N. Haas, and ? Nathan, among those physical
anthropologists who have examined data on the cemeter(ies) at Qumran.

  Kurth is associated with the second and third of the three series of
excavations of the Qumran cemeter(ies) as reported by de Vaux.
  Haas and Nathan are associated with the additional series of excavations
reported by Steckoll and cut short by the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when
Qumran changed from Jordanian jurisdiction to Israeli jurisdiction.

  I did extensive research on the Qumran cemetery figures last year,
without publishing them, with the particular aim of discovering what the
earliest assessments of the graves involved in terms of gender
identification. 

  I just wrote these notes up for the joint Kraft-Kraemer (RAK/RSK)
Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, and then summarized my summary.
Since, even so, it exceeds 100 lines, I'll send it in a separate post. The
summary is without the bibliographical notes of the full writeup of my
notes, so please let me know if the "how do we know this?" question
bothers you. 

  The summary post which follows is an account not of the state of the
question before Joe Zias's presentation at AAR/SBL, but as a simpler
account of the state of the information immediately (more or less) after
the graves were excavated. 

Sigrid Peterson  UPenn   petersig@ccat.sas.upenn.edu


For private reply, e-mail to petersig@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Sigrid Peterson)
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