ement. Today, C-14 dating technique involves the of small gas counters and accelerator-mass-spectrometry (AMS) techniques that were developed in the 1970s. These new techniques require only a small amount of a sample for analysis. This new technique broadens the reach of the effects of the discovery of radiocarbon dating. (Bowman, 1990). These allowed C-14 dating to be involved in dating one of the most famous artifacts, the Shroud of Turin. ("Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin", 1989)The Shroud of Turin is the supposed burial cloth of Jesus. The shroud itself appears to show a person who was crucified. The Shroud of Turin became an object of some veneration because of its supposed association with Christ. Its history dates back at least as far as the mid. 14th century AD. The fist photograph of the shroud showed the man as a negative image, a three-dimensional picture. This, along with other discoveries, such as the supposed presence of pollen spores from Israel on the cloth has suggested the shroud might be an important and genuine relic. ("Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin", 1989) In the 1980s, the archbishop of Turin, the Pontifical Custodian of the shroud, gave permission to a group of scientist to date small pieces of fabric sampled from the schroud. Under the inspection of the British Museum, radiocarbon labs at Tucson (US), Oxford (England), and Zurich (Switzerland) dated the samples, along with three control samples of varying ages. FIGURE 4 shows the results of the three labs. The results gave a certainty of 95%. The results of the three labs were consistent. Figure 5 shows the calibration of the age of the shroud using the mean of the three labs to determine it. The results demonstrate that the shroud belongs to 1260-1390 AD (rounded to the nearest +/-10 yr.); this is the time when the shroud first appeared in historical records. ("Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin", 1989) The results shows that t...
