From livescience.com: Warriors Once Occupied Dead Sea Scrolls Site.
Fierce warriors once occupied the famous complex where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, new research suggests.
Ruins of the Qumran site—in the present-day West Bank—resemble a monastery, but scholars have argued over its uses before the religious sect who penned the scrolls moved in somewhere between 130 and 100 B.C.
Using the world’s first virtual 3-D reconstruction of the site, historians recently found evidence of a fortress that was later converted into its more peaceful, pious function.
"Once you put all the archaeological evidence into three dimensions, the solution literally jumps out at you," said William Schniedewind, chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies at UCLA and the project’s principle investigator. [continue]
This article distorts the facts. The ruins of Qumran do not at all “resemble a monastery”—that notion has been refuted by an entire series of Israeli archaeologists who have been unable to find any evidence whatsoever that the site was anything other than a fortress and then a commercial outpost and pottery factory. Schniedewind (who is not a “historian” or even an archaeologist, but rather a biblical scholar) has not “found evidence” of this, he has simply (1) copied the findings of those archaeologists without properly crediting them and (2) attempted to concoct a reconciliation of the facts as now known with the old Qumran-Essene theory of scroll origins. For example, he continues to postulate that one of the rooms was a “scriptorium,” even though the archaeologists now agree that this idea of Father de Vaux’s was erroneous. For further details, see http://www.nowpublic.com/warriors_occupied_qumran_scrolls_battle_continues
and
http://www.nowpublic.com/dead_sea_scrolls_qumran_fortress_team_responds_criticism