Wormwood:
They place the shroud at sometime closer to the middle ages. Not that it is a fake, it just isn’t the cloth in which christ was wrapped.
The dating of the middle ages is what I was talking about. Did they speak of the bioplastic coating? Did they mention the false reading of the Mayan artifact? How about the Egyptian’s shroud?
"As Garza-Valdes was aware, if the ‘Itzamna’ were genuine it would have been used in special ritual in which the Mayan king anointed it with his own blood and, on noting patches of brownish detritus in the ‘Itzamna’s’ crevices, he took scraping of these and had them analyzed, finding them indeed positive for blood and for human DNA. When he sent samples to Arizona’s radiocarbon-dating labarotary, he learned that they dated to c.AD400, thereby conclusively overturning the dismissal of the carving as a modern fake by the two New York ‘connoisseurs’.
Even so, the puzzle about this date was that it was some six centuries later that the particular Mayan period suggested by the carving’s artistic style and it was here that Dr Garza-Valdes’s bioplastic coating discovery came into its own. Because the coating’s steady accumulation had covered all surfaces of the carving and, like plaque on teeth, is virtually invisible unless its presence is revealed by a disclosing medium, the Arizona labarotory had completely unwittingly dated this coating with the blood. The combined result therefore made the carving seem several centuries younger than it actually was.’ P224
What cannot be be emphasized enough is that if Dr G-V’s findings are valid (and at the time of writing they have yet to be fully developed and published for proper independant scrutiny), their raminifications range far beyond just the Shroud. As he himself stressed: ‘Every single ancient artefact has a covering of the bacteria or bioplastic covering. It is not a thing peculiar to the Shroud.’ P229
In which regard, and confirming that this is no mere pseudo-scientific quackery, one person to have taken a very serious interest indeed in these ideas is the already mentioned world-respected Egyptologist Dr Rosalie David of the Manchester Museum. As may be recalled, during her intensive examination of the Manchester collection’s Egyptian mummy no. 1770, Dr David had been puzzled by the British Museum radiocarbon-dating labarotory’s finding that his mummy’s bandages purportedly dated 800 to 1000 years younger than the body. Although it could not be completely ruled out that the mummy had been rewrapped 1000 years after its first interment, she did not think this likely.
Accordingly, this and other aberrant radiocarbon-dating findings, particular pertaining to linen, led her to suspect that there might be some as yet unrecognized contaminant to such wrappings that made them seem very substantially younger than they really were. However, she had no real idea what this contaminant might be until she heard of Dr Garza-Valdea buiplastic coating.’ P228
Blessings,
Shoshana
