The discovery is usually dated to 1947, when Bedouin of the Ta'amireh tribe came upon jars of scrolls in a cave at Qumran. Over the next nine years archaeologists and Bedouin between them located eleven caves, yielding intact scrolls and tens of thousands of fragments. Excavation of the nearby ruin of Qumran revealed a communal settlement with cisterns and a large writing or dining hall, which many scholars connected with the scrolls.
Assembling and publishing the fragments took decades, and access to the unpublished material became a scholarly controversy in its own right before the full corpus was released in the early 1990s. The manuscripts passed, with the territory, from Jordanian to Israeli control after 1967; today the Israel Antiquities Authority conserves the great majority and has digitised them, while the finest scrolls are exhibited at the Shrine of the Book, purpose-built as a wing of the Israel Museum. A portion excavated during the Jordanian period remains in Amman.
Custody is politically contested. Because Qumran lies in the West Bank, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority have both challenged Israeli possession of material taken after 1967, and individual purchases and sales of fragments have raised further disputes. These questions of ownership are separate from the authenticity of the manuscripts, which is not in doubt.