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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 likeness of Jesus' head. But Wilson cites a 13th century memoir by a French soldier, housed in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, that appears to describe it as a whole body ("there was the shroud in which Our Lord had been wrapped, which every Friday raised itself upright, so that one could see the figure of Our Lord on it"). Existing crease marks, says Wilson, explain the way in which today's shroud might be folded to display only the head but unfolded for the benefit of special viewers. He then creates a plausible chronology for the image extending backward to Edessa (located in central Turkey), where legend dates it to Jesus' era, and forward again via those larcenous Crusaders to Lirey, where its modern history begins. The time line, of course, contradicts the 1988 results. "All this inevitably gives rise to the question," Wilson writes in his new book, "Can anyone any longer be quite so sure of radiocarbon dating's claim 'conclusively' to have proved the shroud a medieval fake?... Is it not time, now, to look just a little more critically at the technique's own credibility?"
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. "The sample used for dating," he asserts, "came from an area that is water-stained and scorched, and the edge is back-woven, indicating repair"--not from a clean portion, as the dating team insists. Adler says that infrared spectroscopy indicates that the sample's threads differ from those in the rest of the shroud. That doesn't guarantee, he hastens to acknowledge, that the sample was insufficiently testable and representative. But to be sure, he says, "you need more than one sample."
A 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.