“Could the carbon dating be fallible?”
“The shroud had been damaged in a fire and repairs were made to it. IIRC, the test samples were taken from a repaired area and so reflected the age of the repairs, not the shroud.”
Also often overlooked or not addressed by reviewers/analysts is that the fire itself would have deposited free carbons from the combusted materials wherever the smoke reached.
It would therefore be the Carbon-14 of burned materials (the wooden box, frames, tapestries, church timbers, pews, altars, etc.) that was being traced, not the original fabric.
It is also utterly shocking that “scientists” would pull a sample for dating from a section that had been so obviously re-weaved. Are they that incompetent or did they have an agenda?
Carbon 14 Dating Problems:
1988 C-14 Results: A tiny piece of the Shroud (.0014%) was Carbon-14-dated to the period 1260 - 1390 AD
There were Significant Flaws with the Process and with the Sample Area tested:
Inaccurate: Carbon dating of textiles in general has problems with accuracy: an Egyptian mummy-wrapping showed an age 700 years younger than the body.
Inconsistent: A Government test of 38 C-14 labs, which used both conventional dating method and the newer Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AMS) method, showed actual errors 3 times greater than claimed. Only 7 labs had satisfactory results, and the AMS method did badly.
Unscientific: Original agreement was to take cloth samples from multiple places, tested by 7 labs using 2 different methods. After political maneuvering, the Church changed it to only 3 labs, with the 3 samples to be taken from only one small area. Only AMS dating was used.
Secretive: The crucial moment of placing Test Samples and control samples into metal cylinders, observed by only 3 people, Dr. Tite of the British Museum, Cardinal Ballestro of Turin, and the Cardinal’s scientific advisor, Professor Gonella, was not filmed.
Invalid: The Test Sample was too small to be statistically valid. The 3 labs tested a postage-stamp-sized area that came from the worst-contaminated and most-repaired area of the Shroud (1 sq. inch out of total Shroud’s 7,400 sq. inches).
Non-Representative: Test Sample data did not pass the “Chi-Squared” statistical test, which shows how samples in a test relate. The Chi-Squared value must be lower than 6, but the Samples’ value was 6.4; therefore, the 3 sub-samples cannot be considered to be from the same overall sample.
Non-Representative: The Weight of the Test Samples was about 42 milligrams per square centimeter, almost double the normal Shroud linen weight of 25 milligrams per square centimeter, therefore the Test Sample pieces must have contained extra material in them.
Contaminated: The Test Sample Area had been dyed with Madder Root Dye applied in a plant-gum medium, to hide repairs made after the 1532 Fire; the gum-and-dye mixture is not found elsewhere on the Shroud.
Misleading: The Test Sample had significant amounts of cotton mixed with the linen to help dye adhere (from the 1532 AD repairs). However, the Main Body of the Shroud linen has only a very small trace of cotton impurity, and it is not part of the weave. If there was merging of cotton from the year 1532 into the Test Sample Area, it would definitely have skewed the carbon-dating towards the Middle Ages.
Sorry, it has been considered, Lowell1775, and discounted. The problem is that to skew the date so far, the amount of contaminant (soot) from other sources than original Shroud material from the fire of 1532AD would have to be more than 60% by weight. The samples were washed and examined and no such contaminants were seen. Believe me, if that much carbon soot were there it would be quite visible. It would cake the Shroud linen quite thickly and change the color to gray or black. It doesn't.
The only viable theory is the one that proved finally to be true: That the tested samples had much of their original weave REPLACED by 16th century French cotton dyed to match the original first century linen Flax in a repair done by a method developed in the 15th century called French Invisible Reweaving, in which the actual threads of the original are twisted to unite with new dyed threads to replace the missing damaged area which is then rewoven in a matching pattern. This technique was developed to repair expensive art tapestries, arras, and other wall hangings that became worn or moth-eaten. Linen, made of flax, did not take dye well, but the French cotton did, and could be matched well to the aged appearance of the old linen of the Shroud. However there are differences. The Cotton threads are of a "Z" twist to facilitate twisting them into the opposite "S" twist of the main-body Linen threads of the Shroud. The cotton threads are fractionally smaller and a bit more even in size than the Linen threads, showing they were spun on a spinning wheel, rather than hand-spun. The Cotton threads are, most importantly, DYED, and fixed with a madder-root dye using alum . . . which is not present on the rest of the Shroud. In addition, the threads in the area where the cotton exists in the patch, vanillin is still present, but there is no vanillin present in the rest of the Shroud threads. Vanillin deteriorates in a linear fashion and the amount in any cloth changes overtime and finally reduces to zero only after the passage of 1300 years Turin shroud 'older than thought'—BBC, January 31, 2005, from a paper by Raymond Rogers in Thermochimica Acta, . . . proof positive that the cloth of the main Shroud is at least 1300 years old, or 700AD of older.