It is an ancient piece of cloth with a rare three-to-one herringbone twill weave made of handspun linen. The fiber is thought to be made from Near-Eastern or Mediterranean basin flax. By comparison to other ancient linen, which is typically a common one-over-one weave, the linen of the Shroud is considered an expensive piece of cloth. The weave is particularly rare.

Recently, Mechthild Flury Lemberg, a former curator of the Abegg Foundation textile museum in Switzerland and a leading authority on historic textiles, has found a strong similarity between the Shroud's fabric and fragments of cloth produced in the Middle East about 2,000 years ago. Lemberg has likened stitching on both hems of the Shroud and on a lengthy seam down one side to that on cloth found in the ruins of Masada. Masada was a Jewish stronghold overlooking the Dead Sea and Jordan. The Masada fabrics have been dated at between 40 BCE and 73 CE.

In 1988, three pieces of the Shroud's linen fabric were subjected to Carbon 14 dating. The test results, then considered conclusive by many, were that the linen was produced between 1260 and 1390 CE. However, upon further examination, the radiocarbon results are now considered highly suspect. Scientists now believe that 2000 years of contamination, the discovery of bioplastic coating that is growing on at least some of the fibers, and a plausible chemical "rejuvenation" caused by fire damage in 1532, could have skewed the results enough to recalibrate the results to the first century.  

In 1982, Dr. Joseph Kohlbeck, Resident Scientist at the Hercules Aerospace Center in Utah, with assistance from Dr. Richard Levi-Setti of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, compared dirt from the Shroud to travertine aragonite limestone found in ancient Jewish tombs in Israel. The particles of dirt on the Shroud matched limestone found in the tombs. As Ian Wilson explains it in his book, The Blood and the Shroud:

Levi-Setti put both sets of samples through his high-resolution microprobe, and as he and Kolbeck studied the pattern of spectra produced by each it became quite obvious that they were indeed an unusually close match, the only disparity being a slight organic variation readily explicable as due to minute pieces of flax that could not be separated from the Shroud's calcium. 

Kolbeck acknowledges that this is not absolute proof that the Shroud was in Jerusalem and that there might be other places in the world (though none are known) where aragonite has the identical chemical signature. This finding is strong evidence that the Shroud originated in the Jerusalem environs. When considered with the other supporting evidence: the Masada fabric findings and the very clear pollen evidence, we can be certain that the cloth was in the Jerusalem area before its appearance in Europe.