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WhiteDove
Guest
Another good article from BBC
Turin shroud ‘older than thought’
So, what do you guys think? Is it authentic???
Turin shroud ‘older than thought’
So, what do you guys think? Is it authentic???
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MaggieOH
Guest
The shroud is authentic. The new tests are more reliable than the carbon dating. Also I have seen mention of plant fibre material that had been found that indicates the shroud is from the Middle East.
I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.
MaggieOH
I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.
MaggieOH
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HagiaSophia
Guest
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Annunciata
Guest
I’m w/ you…
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Bobby_Jim
Guest
I actually went and read the peer-reviewed article in Thermochimica Acta:
sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-A-MsSAYZW-UUA-AAUEVCZVCZ-AAUDUBDWCZ-YYBZEUWEB-A-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=full&_udi=B6THV-4DTBVHC-1&_coverDate=01%2F20%2F2005&_cdi=5292&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000049540&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=965532&md5=1a808c783c913eb2ac1cf5e569a63fdd
for those of you with subscription access.
It’s an interesting piece. To me, it highlights how the work of dating an artifact is a very complicated piece of forensic detective work - not nearly so simple as taking a sample and running a single type of test. The shroud clearly has complicated history, including mounting on a backing cloth, and reweaving of certain worn sections, even to the point of applying some extra yellowing agents to make the new parts look old. None of this gets mentioned in a simple statement like “radiocarbon dating shows it’s 700 years old”.
Now if I were one of the peer-reviewers, I might suggest to the author that the specific dating technique he uses - the aging of lignin in linen fibers - seems to me like it could benefit from a wider variety of samples “intermediate” age. Specifically, he seems to have developed his model from a relatively “small” number of linen samples that were aged for up to 2 years at different temperatures, and then samples that are known to be very old… I think it could benefit greatly from having linen samples that are known to be 100, 200, 500 years old, in addition to 3, 6, 12, 24 months and 2000 years. To his credit, he gives very large margins of error - so he predicts that the Shroud is between 1300 and 3000 years old. A major “unknown” in his calculation is the temperature of storage - not just the average, but peak daytime temperatures make a big difference in this type of calculation (he proposes an exponential or Arrhenius-type dependence on temperature, for you chemistry geeks).
Apart from that specific chemical dating technique, there is some other interesting stuff in there on analysis of threads, and different dyes and gums that can be detected on them, and to what periods and places those can be dated, and also the pyrolysis mass spec results seem to support the hypothesis that fibers used for the radiocarbon dating have a specific gum coating like Gum Arabic, which would have been used as a yellowing agent during the time when a re-weaving occurred, whereas fibers from elsewhere on the shroud do not show this.
Interesting thing about all of this is that it eliminates the need for hand-wavy explanations based on changes in isotopic content from burning, or the dreaded biological coating of fibers (which indeed can throw off carbon dates by a few hundred years, but I always thought it was a stretch to think it could throw off the date by a factor of 3).
sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-A-MsSAYZW-UUA-AAUEVCZVCZ-AAUDUBDWCZ-YYBZEUWEB-A-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=full&_udi=B6THV-4DTBVHC-1&_coverDate=01%2F20%2F2005&_cdi=5292&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000049540&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=965532&md5=1a808c783c913eb2ac1cf5e569a63fdd
for those of you with subscription access.
It’s an interesting piece. To me, it highlights how the work of dating an artifact is a very complicated piece of forensic detective work - not nearly so simple as taking a sample and running a single type of test. The shroud clearly has complicated history, including mounting on a backing cloth, and reweaving of certain worn sections, even to the point of applying some extra yellowing agents to make the new parts look old. None of this gets mentioned in a simple statement like “radiocarbon dating shows it’s 700 years old”.
Now if I were one of the peer-reviewers, I might suggest to the author that the specific dating technique he uses - the aging of lignin in linen fibers - seems to me like it could benefit from a wider variety of samples “intermediate” age. Specifically, he seems to have developed his model from a relatively “small” number of linen samples that were aged for up to 2 years at different temperatures, and then samples that are known to be very old… I think it could benefit greatly from having linen samples that are known to be 100, 200, 500 years old, in addition to 3, 6, 12, 24 months and 2000 years. To his credit, he gives very large margins of error - so he predicts that the Shroud is between 1300 and 3000 years old. A major “unknown” in his calculation is the temperature of storage - not just the average, but peak daytime temperatures make a big difference in this type of calculation (he proposes an exponential or Arrhenius-type dependence on temperature, for you chemistry geeks).
Apart from that specific chemical dating technique, there is some other interesting stuff in there on analysis of threads, and different dyes and gums that can be detected on them, and to what periods and places those can be dated, and also the pyrolysis mass spec results seem to support the hypothesis that fibers used for the radiocarbon dating have a specific gum coating like Gum Arabic, which would have been used as a yellowing agent during the time when a re-weaving occurred, whereas fibers from elsewhere on the shroud do not show this.
Interesting thing about all of this is that it eliminates the need for hand-wavy explanations based on changes in isotopic content from burning, or the dreaded biological coating of fibers (which indeed can throw off carbon dates by a few hundred years, but I always thought it was a stretch to think it could throw off the date by a factor of 3).
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