As the title suggests, this book is divided into four chapters covering categories of artifacts from Roland de Vaux's excavations in the Qumran settlement (1951–56) and at Ein Feshkha (1956, 1958): stone; oil lamps; glass; and various materials including clay and plaster, bone, and fine local and imported pottery (local coarse wares, metal objects, and coins are not included). Each chapter is accompanied by line drawings and photographs of the artifacts, and plans showing their distribution at the site. One peculiarity is that each chapter is paginated separately, instead of having a running sequence of pages from beginning to end of the volume. Donceel (D) and Donceel-Voûte (D-V) invest much effort in reconstructing the original contexts of the artifacts, including generating distribution maps. Unfortunately, this is a futile task in most cases due to the nature of de Vaux's excavations and records as well as cleaning and dumping activities (as in Period III), which redeposited artifacts in different parts of the site.

In 1986, Donceel was invited to assist in the publication of the material from de Vaux's excavations by Jean-Baptiste Humbert, the current archaeologist at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jerusalem. A few years later, the two authors advanced the sensational claim that Qumran was not a sectarian settlement but a villa rustica; see “The archaeology of Khirbet Qumran”, in Michael O. Wise et al. (eds), Methods of Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site, Present Realities and Future Prospects (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 22, June 20, 1994), 1–38. Soon thereafter, Humbert revoked his invitation to assist with the publication, and D and D-V returned to Belgium, reportedly taking with them copies of the excavation notebooks and records. The current volume appears to be based on these materials.

In the meantime, Humbert has given many of these artifacts to other scholars for publication. For example, Jolanta Młynarczyk published a chapter on the oil lamps in Humbert and Alain Chambon, Khirbet Qumrân et Aïn Feshkha, Fouilles du P. Roland de Vaux, IIIA, L'archéologie de Qumrân. Reconsidération de l'intepretation, Les installations périphériques de Khirbet Qumran (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016) (pp. 447–521), while the glass was published by H. Wouters et al. (“Antique glass from Qumran”, Bulletin de l'Institut Royal du Patrimonie Artistique 28 [1999/2000], 9–40). In addition, Dennis Mizzi published a synthetic study of the glass from Qumran and has been preparing the publication of the stone vessels (for the former, see “The glass from Khirbet Qumran: what does it tell us about the Qumran community?”, in C. Hempel (ed.), The Dead Sea Scrolls, Texts and Context [Leiden: Brill, 2010], 99–198). Finally, some of the pottery and ceramic objects published here are included in the Humbert and Chambon volume cited above (e.g. Jerusalem painted bowls [“pseudo-Nabataean”]; ceramic rings).

This means that not only are there conflicting interpretations of Qumran but multiple publications of many of the same artifacts. Although this adds to the confusion surrounding Qumran, having more data is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem with this volume lies not in the documentation of the material as such, but rather the manipulation of the presentation to support their interpretation of Qumran as a villa rustica.

For example, D and D-V compare Judean chalkstone vessels of the late Second Temple period to Gallo-Roman/Alpine vessels of materials such as jasper, marble, alabaster, and porphyry, arguing that the former have no connection to the observance of Jewish purity laws, as indicated by the silence of “Jewish halakhic texts”. They dismiss the reference to stone jars in John 2: 1–6, ignore rabbinic literature (including numerous passages in the Mishnah); and appear to be unaware of Hanan Eshel's article about the Qumran sect's view on the purity of stone (“CD 12: 15–17 and the stone vessels found at Qumran”, in J.M. Baumgarten, E.G. Chazon, and A. Pinnick (eds), The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery. Proceedings of the Third International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 4–8 February, 1998 [Leiden: Brill, 2000], 45–52). Their bibliography lacks a number of important references including most of those cited in this review, and, in the case of stone vessels, Yonatan Adler's PhD dissertation (“The archaeology of purity: archaeological evidence for the observance of ritual purity in Ereẓ-Israel from the Hasmonean period until the end of the talmudic era (164 bce–400 ce)”, The Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology; Ramat-Gan, 2011 [Hebrew with English summary]). D and D-V's argument that small stone vessels are unattested in the Alpine region because wood was used overlooks the discovery of wooden bowls in caves along the Dead Sea including around Qumran. They attempt to situate Judean chalkstone vessels of the late Second Temple period (seemingly unaware of examples as late as the third–fourth centuries in Galilee and southern Judea) within a long-lived local tradition by lumping them together with early Islamic steatite vessels, to which they have no relationship (the latter reflect an Egyptian or Arabian tradition introduced to Palestine in the eighth century).

Similarly, D and D-V assign a dozen pieces of finely worked paving stone to an opus sectile floor in the pars urbana section of their supposed villa rustica. However, as Ehud Netzer demonstrated, there is no evidence of opus sectile floors at Qumran or Ein Feskha: “One would expect either a large number of opus sectile tiles … and even more than this, evidence of the floor's bedding (which is not an object for looting)”. Netzer concluded that the few paving stones and architectural fragments at both sites must have been brought from elsewhere (“Did any perfume industry exist at ʻEin Feshkha?”, Israel Exploration Journal 55, 2005, 97–100; 98; also see Mizzi, “Qumran period I reconsidered: an evaluation of several competing theories”, Dead Sea Discoveries 22/1, 2015, 1–42; 30–40).

As space precludes further examples, I conclude that this volume should be used critically and with caution, and I recommend balancing D and D-V's presentation by consulting Młynarczyk's publication of the oil lamps and Mizzi's study of the glass.