Evangelicals digging at the ancient settlement of Qumran, where the first scrolls  were discovered in 1947, previously thought they had exhausted all discoveries at Cave 53 and had given up on unearthing any more parchments.

But more than seven decades since Bedouin goat herders peered into a cave and found the Jewish separatist texts, archaeologist Randall Price and his team have made a discovery that has encouraged them to keep searching.

Mr Price, a Texan theologian, shared the fruits of his Israeli team’s labour with National Geographic as he ploughs on with Hebrew University work some regard as illegal as the site is in the occupied West Bank.

Digs for the scrolls have been a source of controversy since the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel’s opponents argue that searches should not be carried out without Palestinian involvement.

It comes after dig director Oren Gutfeld came across blank rolls of parchment in Cave 53, prompting him to say: ‘It was blank – but next time maybe it won’t be.’

The initial find of seven parchments reveled that the scrolls were placed in the cave around AD70 but the oldest date back as far as 300BC.

After the Israeli government signed the Oslo Accords to transfer territories to Palestinian control in 1993, it launched an urgent survey of archaeological sites it stood to lose.

One of the sites they mapped was recorded as Cave 53, which caught Price’s attention in 2010 and later Gutfeld, who described it as a ‘juicy’ cave

However on Monday last week Mr Price said that a shallow dig unearthed evidence that his team could be close to finding their ‘mother lode’.

‘They didn’t dig very deep,’ he said. ‘Our hope is that if we keep digging, we hit the mother lode.’

The diggers are responding to demand from US evangelicals as relics are shipped to Christian theme parks in Florida.

The Bedouins who stumbled on the first seven parchments are said to have sold them to two Bethlehem antiquities dealers.

Then dealer Khalil Iskander Shahin sold the four remaining scrolls to a Syrian archbishop in Jerusalem, who later smuggled them to the US when he feared for their safety during 1949’s Arab-Israeli War.

But after receiving no buyers at American universities, the scrolls were bought in 1954 by an Israeli archaeologist and they reside in the Israeli wing of the country’s national museum in Jerusalem.

By by the mid-2000s, translators had published most of their findings. Scrolls ranged from apocalyptic treatises to accounts of daily life in the Qumran sect