Word: radiocarbon
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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...
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...
TAINTED SAMPLES? The strongest and most 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...
...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...
...Radiocarbon experts, however, rebuff both sets of charges. Choosing an unbesmirched area was one of the most important decisions they could have made at the time. Says anthropologist R. Ervin Taylor, director of the radiocarbon-dating lab at the University of California at Riverside: "If they sampled in the wrong place, then they were idiots--and I know that's not the case." Geoscientist Paul Damon, a member of the University of Arizona team that tested one of the 1988 samples, hastens to say that the swatch was selected conscientiously and on the advice of textile experts. Contradicting Adler...