[dcdanko]

You have the right idea. In some cases the Dead Sea Scrolls were literally shredded- ripped up into small pieces that were sold individually to tourists.

The goal here was to identify parchment fragments that came from the same animal so the original (unshredded) document could be reconstructed.

While we were able to link a lot of parchment fragments we didn't go so far as to actually reconstruct the text on those fragments. While we constrained that task somewhat it's still nontrivial since we don't know what order the fragments should go in, if there are still missing pieces, etc.