How in the world could all those scientists hovering around the shroud in 1988 not know where the piece to be dated came from or not raise a question when it came from a patch?
And why does it take from 1988 'til now to be a story?
Seems to me I recall an extended discussion at the main shroud site about the meticulous selection of the area to be tested. I could be wrong and don't have time to look right now....but I raise the questions because this is just a curious story.
They were sloppy. They were fooled. They should not have been fooled. There were clues that warranted investigation:
In 1973, Gilbert Raes of the Ghent Institute of Textile Technology was given permission to remove a small sample from a corner of the Shroud. In the sample he found cotton fibers. It might have been that the cotton was leftover fibers from a loom that was used for weaving both cotton and linen cloth. It might have been that the Shroud was exposed to cotton much later, even from the gloves used by scientists. However, when later he examined some of the carbon 14 samples, he noticed that cotton fibers, where found, were contained inside threads, twisted in as part of the thread. It is important to note that cotton fiber is not found anywhere else on the Shroud.
P.H South, while examining threads from the sample on behalf of the Oxford University Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory found similar indication of cotton. To him it seemed like material intrusion. In an article entitled "Rogue Fibers Found in Shroud," published in Textile Horizons in 1988, South write of his discovery of "a fine dark yellow strand [of cotton] possibly of Egyptian origin, and quite old . . . it may have been used for repairs at some time in the past, or simply bound in when the linen fabric was woven."
Teddy Hall, of the Oxford radiocarbon dating laboratory, also noticed fibers that looked out of place.
Giovanni Riggi, the person who actually cut the carbon 14 sample from the Shroud stated: "I was authorized to cut approximately 8 square centimetres of cloth from the Shroud…This was then reduced to about 7 cm because fibres of other origins had become mixed up with the original fabric …" (italics mine)
Giorgio Tessiore, who documented the sampling, wrote: “…1 cm of the new sample had to be discarded because of the presence of different color threads.” (italics mine)
Al Adler of Western Connecticut State University found large amounts of aluminum in yarn segments from the radiocarbon sample area, up to 2%, by energy-dispersive x-ray analysis. The question should have been asked: why aluminum? It is not found elsewhere on the Shroud.
In the years following the carbon 14 dating, in the years when careful reexamination seemed warranted, other compelling reasons to be suspicious emerged:
Chemical analysis of the lignin of the flax fibers did not test positive for vanillin. If the Shroud was medieval, it should have. Vanillin disappears slowly from the lignin in flax fibers and all of it has disappeared except in the immediate vicinity of the carbon 14 sample. This indicated that the cloth was much older than the carbon 14 dating suggested and that the carbon 14 sample area was certainly chemically different.
From the article in Thermochimica Acta: "A linen produced in A.D. 1260 would have retained about 37% of its vanillin in 1978. The Raes threads, the Holland cloth [shroud's backing cloth], and all other medieval linens gave the test for vanillin wherever lignin could be observed on growth nodes. The disappearance of all traces of vanillin from the lignin in the shroud indicates a much older age than the radiocarbon laboratories reported."
In 1973, Gilbert Raes, of the Ghent Institute of Textile Technology, had cut a small piece from a corner of the Shroud. One part of it contained cotton fibers among the flax fibers while another part of it did not. Rogers, following up on Raes’ examination of the 1973 sample, also found cotton. Moreover, Rogers found dyestuff and spliced threads that were not found elsewhere on the Shroud. It is significant to note that the carbon 14 sample was taken from a spot adjacent to the Raes sample.
In 2000, M. Sue Benford and Joseph G. Marino, working with a number of textile experts, examined documenting photographs of the carbon 14 sample and found evidence of expert reweaving that joined disparate materials almost at the middle of the sample. The consensus was that there was about 60% new material and 40% original material in the sample. If that is the case, and if the repair was made in the early 1500s as history suggests, then according to Ron Hatfield of Beta Analytic, a first century date for the cloth is reasonable.
In 1997, Remi Van Haelst, a Belgium chemist, conducted a series of statistical analyses that strongly challenged the veracity of the conclusions of the carbon 14 dating. Significantly, he found serious disparities in measurements between the three laboratories and between the sub-samples (various tests and observations performed by the labs). Bryan Walsh, a statistician and physicist, examined Van Haelst’s work and further studied the measurements. The essential conclusions were that the samples, and indeed the divided samples used in multiple tests, contained different levels of the carbon 14 isotope. The differences were sufficient to concluce that the sample were non-homogeneous and thus of questionable validity. Walsh found a significant relationship between various sub-samples and their distance from the edge of the cloth. If indeed a patch was rewoven into the cloth and if the joining of old and new material ran at an angle through the sample cuttings (as it appears to do so) then all this makes sense.
Shroudie
Probably for the same reason the geniuses who devised our modern computer systems and Internet sat around with their fingers up their butts until right before 2000 to announce there might be problem with year coding in computer programs. Or the guys who build a plane or boat in their basements or garages and find out there is no way to get it out after they finish.
People can become so focussed on what their doing that the obvious may escape them.
I'm no expert on Shroud stuff, but for the sake of giving you a quick general response, the situation is this:
The area selected from was part of a repair to the Shroud done at the time of the fire right before it was given to the church in Turin.
Apparently this particular part of the repair was not documented. It was an expert job using an invisible weave that so closely resembled the original material that it was not detected until someone used some kind of spectral photography (?term?) a few years ago.
So the scientists, due to no fault of their own, tested the repair, not the original Shroud material.
Hope that helps, and I will try and get a link to better info for you.