The enduring controversy of the Turin Shroud
Far from putting the debate to rest, the dating of the Turin Shroud merely fuelled the controversy, as Richard Corfield discovers
25 years ago, in the spring of 1989, one of the most important papers in the science of archaeometry · the scientific study of archaeological relics – was published. The Turin Shroud, supposedly the burial cloth that had wrapped the body of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion, was subjected to accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) carbon-14 dating. The result – from three different laboratories – indicated that it did not date from the time of the death of Christ but rather from between AD 1260 and 1390, the early medieval period.