The World of the Scrolls:
In 1947, Young Bedouin shepherds, searching for a stray goat in the
Judean Desert, entered a long-untouched cave and found jars filled
with ancient scrolls. That initial discovery by the Bedouins
yielded seven scrolls and began a search that lasted nearly a
decade and eventually produced thousands of scroll fragments from
eleven caves. During those same years, archaeologists searching for
a habitation close to the caves that might help identify the people
who deposited the scrolls, excavated the Qumran ruin, a complex of
structures located on a barren terrace between the cliffs where the
caves are found and the Dead Sea. Within a fairly short time after
their discovery, historical, paleographic, and linguistic evidence,
as well as carbon-14 dating, established that the scrolls and the
Qumran ruin dated from the third century B.C.E. to 68 C.E. They
were indeed ancient! Coming from the late Second Temple Period, a
time when Jesus of Nazareth lived, they are older than any other
surviving biblical manuscripts by almost one thousand years.
http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/deadsea.scrolls.exhibit/world.scrolls.html