Then they appear to have used the "invisible weaving" technique.
So, damages in the 16th century were repaired with 14th century goods which were then tested by radiocarbon dating and found to be from the 14th century.
There are disputes about how much damage was caused by the fire (which lead, of course, to disputes about which sections are old, and which sections are 14th century), but it's pretty clear that even some sections of the photographic negative were damaged.
I suggest that only those sections with signs of blood, on the body itself, be tested, and then only by whatever sort of non-intrustive technique can ever be developed for that purpose.
I've read about eleventeengazillion times that the nuns who made the fire repair selected OLD CLOTH that had a similar weave and texture.
Mu, I have probably read just about everything written in English on the Shroud of Turin and have seen only ONE suggestion that the repairs done by the Nuns of Poor Clare used "old cloth" to repair the damaged areas. Since the nuns did not document what they repaired except to note the addition of the obvious patches and the addition of the Holland Cloth, one theorist went so far as to attribute the corner repair to Queen Clothilde (of the House of Savoy). Quite frankly, the person who made that suggestion did so ONLY because of the shocking C-14 date and it was his unsupported theory to try and explain away the results that accurately dated what was tested.
Picknet and Prince, in their absurd theory that Leonardo Da Vinci created the Shroud as a joke (ignoring the inconvenient fact that the Shroud was first exhibited in Lirey, almost 100 years before Leonardo's birth), also claimed Leo purposely selected OLD cloth so that "discriminating" shroud testers of the late 15th Century would be fooled into believing it was 1400 years old.
What I told you is the result of peer reviewed scientific tests (chemical analysis, ultraviolet and X-ray photography, photo-microscopic AND scanning electron microscopic examination, micro photo spectrometry AND Courier Transform Infrared Microspectrophotometry) of main body materiels and materials from the one surviving sub-sample (out of five) which was cut from the area between the sub-samples that were destroyed in testing. (I.E. If you number the sub-samples cut from the original master sample cut from the Shroud 1 to 5 from the bottom edge of the Shroud, this would be sub-sample #3.)
From the peer-reviewed work of M. Benford, G. Riggi, A. Adler, N. Rodgers, E. Hall, P.H. Smith, J. Marino and R. Hatfield, all completely qualified scientists, we KNOW that the sample was composed of varying amounts of original and newer material in about a 40-60% mixture at the selvage end to a 60-40% mixture at the end closest to the main body of the Shroud. The bifurcation of this mixture of old and new occurs on a lower right to upper left diagonal line/area. It is only this mixture of 16th Century material mixed with original material that can account for the extraordinary spread of dates. Only if original FIRST CENTURY material is mixed with 16th Century materials, in the observed percentages can the discrepency of the extraordinary dating spread of 130 years be explained.
In fact, that date spread is even worse than I told you because to get to the 1260 - 1390 spread, they cheated:
"The Arizona lab made eight measurements with dates that varied widely. The clearly suggested that the sample was not homogeneous. Rather than deal with the problem, the British Museum asked Arizona to discard the four outside measurements and use only those that were most similar. It was the only way they could calculate a satisfactory error distribution."
It was only "satisfactory" because that was the closest they could get the various sub-sample dates to agree. Incidentally, the Arizona lab got two samples... #1, the one closest to the selvage and the one with the greatest percentage of newer material, and #5, the sub-sample farthest from the edge and the one with the LEAST amount of newer material. They cut each of their two sub-samples into four... across the warp... and tested those. The two extremes reported dates so far out of the acceptable range (to the managing lab director at the British Museum) that they had to be discarded!!! Doesn't this smack of scientific fraud??? I think it does.
We now know that the left (newer material) side of the surviving C-14 sample contains not only cotton contamination, but up to 2% aluminum... while the right (original material) side has no discernable aluminum. The aluminum comes from the use of Alum as a Mordant which was only developed in Europe in the late 15th Century. We also can SEE the spliced threads where the change-over from original material to newer takes place... and, under a microscope, it is very evident but not so with the naked eye. We also have photomicrographs of the destroyed-in-testing samples that show they have similar splices. From all of this now undisputed evidence, we can make the very reasonable assumption that about half (+ or - 10%) of each tested sample was composed of 16th Century Linen fibers.
I suggest that only those sections with signs of blood, on the body itself, be tested, and then only by whatever sort of non-intrustive technique can ever be developed for that purpose.
Excellent suggestion... unfortunatly, as of now, C-14 testing is always destructive of the sample. It is getting better and smaller and smaller samples will be required in the future. Since the "restoration" of the Shroud ill-advisedly done a couple of years ago, there exists a reservoir of Shroud material that is no longer attached to the Shroud, having been clipped, scraped, or vacuumed away. Some of this is original Shroud material that existed at the edges of the charred areas and would be excellent C-14 test material... but I doubt the Shroud's custodians would allow any tests in the near future considering the results of the first C-14 fiasco.
By-the-way, Muawiyah, I notice you are not on my Shroud of Turin Ping List... would you like to be added?