The team also applied their method to the Pentateuch, and were able to verify the general scholarly classification of those books into Priestly and non-Priestly sources with over 90% agreement with the current scholarly consensus.
In principle, the method can be applied to any archaeological site, and several groups of researchers around the world are working on similar projects.
"Our coating method is simple, and it can be applied in the future in large-area manufacturing processes, " said Rui Zhu, a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA Engineering and the paper's lead author.