Word: shroud
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This in itself does not contradict the radiocarbon-dating results, but other aspects of Wilson's research do, most notably a chronology that appears to track the shroud back long before 1260. Wilson finds several European references to what appears to be the shroud in the early 1200s. But more important, he seems, through historical detective work, to have connected it to something called the Edessa Cloth. A historically well-documented object of reverence in Constantinople for 350 years, the cloth disappeared when the Crusaders plundered the city in 1204. Most Byzantine witnesses described it as being a mystically precise...
...obvious technical critique of the radiocarbon dating, springing from an indisputable weakness in the testing procedure, is that since all three labs' specimens came from a single swatch of cloth, all would be affected if the swatch were atypical or contaminated. The mantra for this position, quoted fervently by shroud proponents who might otherwise have little to do with one another, is that "the tests could have been precise without being accurate." Chemist Alan Adler, an emeritus professor at Western Connecticut State University who has worked on the shroud, takes this possibility very seriously. "The sample used for dating...
...related complaint was raised in 1993 by a Russian scientist named Dmitri Kouznetsov and enthusiastically supported by John Jackson, a physicist who was one of the leaders of the 1978 research team and is now co-director of the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado. Kouznetsov suggested that the radiocarbon dates had been thrown off by the entire shroud's exposure to a fire in 1532, which could have been expected to alter its carbon profile...
Several years later, when the three labs, the University of Arizona among them, produced their wet-blanket dates for the Turin shroud, a possibility flashed through Garza-Valdes' mind. What if the shroud too had a "bioplastic" varnish--and the labs had been fooled into decreeing an object younger than it actually was? In May 1993 Garza-Valdes traveled to Turin, microscope in hand, and was put in touch with Giovanni Riggi, the microanalyst who had parceled out the 1988 samples. Riggi let Garza-Valdes examine a tiny piece of shroud that he assured him came from the same batch...
...enough to skew the radiocarbon dating by 1,300 years. What is more, this coating--which is transparent and thus invisible to the naked eye--cannot be removed by the conventional cleaning methods of most radiocarbon labs. Properly cleaned, says Mattingly, "I think you'd find out the [shroud's] linen is much older, though I don't know by how much...