The object
A linen cloth bearing the faint image of a man’s body, front and back, with marks consistent with scourging and crucifixion. Its documented history begins in fourteenth-century France; it has been kept in Turin since the sixteenth century.
The 1988 radiocarbon test
In 1988, three laboratories (Arizona, Oxford, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) dated samples from the Shroud by accelerator mass spectrometry. They reported a calibrated range of about AD 1260-1390, published in Nature 337 (1989), 611-615.
Later challenges
The sampling, the cleaning protocol and the statistical treatment were contested at the time and remain contested by some researchers.
In 2022, Liberato De Caro and colleagues published a wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) study in Heritage 5 (2022), 860-870, arguing for a much earlier date, roughly the first century. The WAXS method measures the ageing of cellulose and depends on an assumed environmental history; it has not displaced the radiocarbon result for most specialists.
Other work has examined whether the 1988 samples were contaminated by repair or by handling (Freer-Waters and Jull, npj Heritage Science, April 2026, on retained textile fragments), and whether bleaching treatments affected the linen (Barta and Ruiz-Navas, npj Heritage Science, September 2026). Neither paper redates the cloth; both examine the sample and its treatment history.
What it establishes
On the radiocarbon evidence, a linen cloth of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, bearing an image whose formation is not fully explained. The 1988 measurement is the one result that has been independently replicated by three laboratories.
Open questions
Is this the cloth that wrapped Jesus’s body? The radiocarbon result points to the Middle Ages, and even a first-century date, if established, would give the age of a cloth rather than its history or the identity of the man it shows. The dossier sets out how the dating claims and their assumptions are argued, so that you can weigh them for yourself.
Where it is now
The Shroud is kept in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin and is only rarely displayed in public.
