Word: shroud
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...April 21, 1988, under the gaze of Anastasio Cardinal Ballestrero of Turin and a video camera, Italian microanalyst Giovanni Riggi cut a 1/2-in. by 3-in. strip of linen from the shroud, well away from its central image and any charred or patched areas. He divided the strip into three postage stamp-size samples and distributed them to representatives of laboratories in Zurich, Oxford and the University of Arizona in Tucson. Each then performed at least three radiocarbon measurements on its sample...
Radiocarbon dating works by measuring an artifact for an isotope called carbon 14, traces of which are contained in all organic substances, including the flax plants from which the shroud's linen was made. Carbon 14 is unstable and decays over time into another isotope. The amount present in living organisms remains nearly constant because it is continually replaced through the intake of food and air. But when animals and plants die, their level of carbon 14 begins to decrease at a known, fixed rate. Thus the amount of residual carbon 14 in an object provides a measurement...
...scientists retreated to their labs. In October of the same year, the Oxford team gave a press conference at the British Museum. To eliminate suspense, they had helpfully written two dates on a chalkboard behind them: "1260-1390!" This estimated span for the origin of the shroud's linen was later detailed in an article co-written with the other two labs for the journal Nature, which straightforwardly stated that the radiocarbon-dating results "provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is medieval." Nuclear physicist Harry Gove, who helped develop the radiocarbon-dating process used...
Well, maybe. Few people have put as much effort into proving that no human hand painted the shroud--and that it is far older than the radiocarbon dating allows--as the cheerful, Oxford-educated Wilson. Perhaps the best known and most open minded of the shroud apologists, Wilson, 57, has penned three shroud books and spent innumerable hours researching the relic. He was first captivated by a photograph of the image at age 15. "It just didn't seem like a work of art to me; it whetted my interest and rocked my agnosticism." He eventually converted to Catholicism...
Despite such eloquent partisanship, which he sustains in The Blood and the Shroud, Wilson is punctiliously fair minded, always printing the other side's opinion before politely taking issue with it. He delights in sindonology's varied arcana. The new book touches on such points as Roman graffiti, the readouts of a machine called the VP-8 Image Analyzer, grisaille (monochrome gray) painting and the feeding habits of the ibis. He discusses the musculature of the brow and the existence of the twill-and-herringbone weave in ancient Palestinian linen, and in a footnote he downplays the possibility that...