Shroud of Turin's Authenticity Probed Anew

Jackson, the director of the Turin Shroud Center in Colorado, has long claimed that a 1532 fire which damaged the cloth may have affected procedures used to date the shroud.

Based on information about C14 dating that wasn't available 20 years ago, Jackson's theory suggests that only a two percent contamination could skew results by 1,500 years.

The details of this collaboration are reported in a documentary to be aired by the British Broadcasting Company on Saturday.

Meanwhile, a new study, published in the book "La Sindone, una Sfida alla Scienza Moderna" ("The Shroud, a Challenge to Modern Science"), by Giulio Fanti, further supports Ramsey's call for revisiting the carbon-14 tests.

"The study, carried out by the researcher Gerardo Ballabio of the Shroud Science group, does add a new twist. It looks at a less known aspect of the C14 tests: how the linen sample was divided into sub-samples by the three laboratories who performed the radiocarbon tests in 1988," Fanti, a professor at Padua University in Italy, told Discovery News.

"Basically, it is a re-analysis of the available data which takes into consideration the spatial positions of the sub-samples on the shroud. It shows that the 1988 statistical results are not correct," Fanti said.

The Shroud in Puzzle Pieces

A previous study by Bryan Walsh, director of the Shroud of Turin Center in Virginia, suggested that differing levels of cabon-14 were present when examining the horizontal positions of sub-samples from the shroud. But the question of whether a gradient also existed in the vertical direction remained open.

It is known that the samples distributed to each lab in 1988 were first cut from a corner of the shroud. Basically, the sample consisted of an 81- by 16-mm rectangle weighing 300 mg. The rectangle had a missing corner as a result of a previous sample extraction.

"This piece of linen was split into two parts. One was divided into three samples to be given to the laboratories, and another was retained in case further material was necessary. Since one of the three samples was significantly smaller than the others, a thin section from the retained part was added to the smaller sub-sample," Ballabio said.

The samples were sealed, documented and forwarded to the labs along with control samples for testing and evaluation. The laboratories in Oxford and Zurich were each given one of the single-piece samples, while the laboratory in Arizona was given the two-part sample.

What happened later is a subject of controversy, according to Ballabio.

"Each lab subdivided the sample in various pieces, making it a puzzle to reconstruct their original position on the shroud," Ballabio said.

In order to reconstruct how the samples were cut, their physical positions on the shroud, and the lab measurements for each sub-sample, Ballabio collected information from many key people involved in the testing operation.

"I ended up with 256 possible combinations," Ballabio said.