Currie, Lloyd A.

Lloyd A. Currie

As the Associated Press, the BBC and The New York Times reported on Rogers’ paper, some people wondered, just as Ball had, if it was possible that threads “were woven into the old cloth so cunningly that the textile experts who selected the area for analysis failed to notice the substitution.”  Others wondered if there was perhaps more to the story. Was this the whole story? How could such a mistake in radiocarbon dating happen? Was there something to learn from this?

About a year before Rogers’ paper was published, in early 2004, the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST, U.S. Government Printing Office) published an important paper by Lloyd A. Currie. Currie, a highly regarded specialist in the field of radiocarbon dating and an NIST Fellow Emeritus, wrote a seminal retrospective on carbon 14 dating. Because the Shroud of Turin was such a famous test, Currie devoted much of his paper to it.

Like Rogers, Currie dismissed any argument that radiocarbon labs had done anything wrong in dating the Shroud of Turin. Currie also rejected, as Rogers also had done, the theories of scorching effects or contamination caused by a bioplastic polymer. Significantly, Currie acknowledged that disguised mending was a viable explanation. He cited the work of Rogers and Arnoldi. He found it credible.

William Meacham

Currie also raised an important issue of faulty procedures that could have prevented an error from invisible reweaving. According to Currie, the original sampling protocol required multiple samples from different locations on the cloth. Archeologist William Meacham disagrees on historical detail but not scientific principle. In a recent email to about 100 shroud researchers, Meacham stated that the original protocol called for a single sample to be divided among seven labs. He wrote:

Al Adler and I argued forcefully but unsuccessfully . . . for at least a second sample . . . the original protocol was seriously flawed, so it should not be described as some sort of properly designed scientific procedure that was put aside.

Had multiple samples been taken, the chemical differences between the sample area and the rest of the shroud would certainly have been obvious to the labs in 1988.

Rogers blamed church authorities in Turin for not following standard scientific protocol. In the interview with Inside the Vatican magazine, Rogers said:

The sampling operation should have involved many persons from different fields before cutting anything . . . if you really want to get a radiocarbon data, take a lot of samples.