[Swordmaker]

I have been told by people much smarter than I am that the issue with Carbon dating something like this is the exposure that it has had to the elements over the years. If you have a bone or fossil which has been buried for X number of years it has not received fresh contamination which would distort the findings.

You've been told wrong. The amount of contamination to skew a date of an old object such a large number of centuries is huge. For the shroud, it would require that almost half the weight of the sample be modern material to skew it that far. . . and that's what happened! They tested a sample that had a patch invisibly rewoven into the older material! They broke protocols about where samples were to be taken and about how many were to be taken. They got garbage results because they did that.

[verga]

You've been told wrong. The amount of contamination to skew a date of an old object such a large number of centuries is huge. For the shroud, it would require that almost half the weight of the sample be modern material to skew it that far. . . and that's what happened! They tested a sample that had a patch invisibly rewoven into the older material! They broke protocols about where samples were to be taken and about how many were to be taken. They got garbage results because they did that.

It seems like I was misinformed and there are quite few people up thread that agree with you. Thank you.