“A secretive encounter with a Bedouin in a desert valley” has led to “the discovery of two fragments from a nearly 2,000-year-old parchment scroll” that, if authenticated, would be the first such findings in the Judean Desert since the Dead Sea Scrolls, according to an Associated Press wire story by Danielle Haas. “The two small pieces of brown animal skin, inscribed in Hebrew with verses from the Book of Leviticus, are from ‘refugee’ caves in Nachal Arugot, a canyon near the Dead Sea where Jews hid from the Romans in the second century,” according to Professor Chanan Eshel, an archaeologist from Bar Ilan University. While the way the scrolls were obtained — for $3,000 from the mysterious Bedouin — seems to make Eshel hesitant, he is also clearly excited by the find because it could mean that an area thought to be exhausted may still yield more treasure. “No scrolls have been found in the Judean Desert” in decades, he tells Haas. “The common belief has been that there is nothing left to find there.”