Toilet trek

You've got to love a good old-fashioned archeological free-for-all. Especially when the rhubarb concerns 2000-year-old caca. At issue, according to a recent AP story, is whether an ancient latrine proves that the settlement at Qumran was populated by the Essenes, an ascetic, apocalypse-minded Jewish sect that may have written the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most scholars, including the professors who taught me at seminary hold to this view. The minority viewpoint says that the Dead Sea Scrolls were plopped into the nearby caves by a whole other set of Jews.

I'm in the Essene camp myself, but I'm not sure the existence of buried human excrement on the outskirts of a settlement tells us anything about who once lived there. It is true that the Essenes had some pretty strict ideas about what to do with poo, and wrote them down. But that doesn't mean that everybody else in the world took no care about where they relieved themselves. Those archeologists who posit the latrine as the repository of Essene excrement (and try saying that 3 times fast) believe that such evidence makes it more likely that the Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Of course, the controversial latrine was a nine-minute walk from the settlement, which seems to me a long haul when nature calls. Of course, a nearly one-mile hike to go number two is just the sort of thing you'd expect from those wacky Essenes.