Archaeology
He had worked on several excavations when Gerald Lankester Harding, the director of the Jordanian Antiquities Department, contacted him in 1947 to investigate a cave near the Dead Sea where some scrolls had been found. By that time he had been director of the Ecole Biblique for four years. The cave later became known in Qumran nomenclature as Cave 1, the first cave to yield texts which became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The first of five seasons of excavations at the nearby Qumran ruins commenced in December 1951. Besides excavating Qumran, de Vaux also did seasons at Wadi Murabba'at with Lankester Harding in 1952, and at 'Ein Feshkha, a few kilometres south of Qumran, in 1958, while returning regularly to Tell el-Far'ah (north) from 1946 to 1960.
As de Vaux worked at Qumran and its vicinity more scrolls were found and these discoveries brought a small group of young scholars of Hebrew to work on them. These scholars, some of whom worked on their allotted scrolls for decades, included Józef Milik, John Marco Allegro and John Strugnell.
From 1961 to 1963 he worked with Kathleen Kenyon in excavations in Jerusalem.
De Vaux chose not to publish a definitive archaeological report for his work at Qumran despite worldwide interest, though he left behind him copious notes, which have been synthesized into a single volume and published in 2003.
Read more about this topic: Roland De Vaux