“Both returned ages comfortably in the mid-first century range plus/minus 75 years.”
Interesting. Please provide test documentation including labs, radiochemists and source tracebility.
As I said, these were “unauthorized, unofficial, unpublished tests. As such they cannot be traced, reported officially or ever published. They are only talked about in the Shroud community by word of mouth. The techs/scientists who did them did so without authority and would be excoriated if anyone with official capacity and authority of the keeping of the samples took notice. So the names, dates, labs, and details are obscured deliberately.
We know that someone had a thread portion left over from some other testing and made fibers and/or the thread available unofficially for the unauthorized test as long as it did not get back to him/her where the source of the sample came from. If it did, (s)he’d be excluded from ALL access to any further official research for life. Same for those persons/labs who did the testing. Those who did it felt it was important enough to do the test to find out if it was worth expending the political capital to keep pushing the Vatican and Turin to authorize official tests, or, if the tests came back with some other dates, to just drop it, go on to some other pursuits.
I’ve been around Shroud circles for fifty years. I know there was an unauthorized pre-STURP, small sample C14 test—apparently done in Italy or Switzerland—which returned an approximate first century date plus or minus 150 years. Again, this was a test that could not be publicized due to lack of official status. That one was so clandestine I have no clue as to who, when, where, etc.
That early unreported but whispered test is one of the reasons why people in Shroud circles were so shocked at the 1988 c.1350 test results, especially since it went so much against all the other scholarship that existed showing the Shroud existed in history long prior to that 1350AD date.
Unfortunately in science, if the provenance of your samples are not “officially” approved, then the test is not itself officially sanctioned as publishable, not officially citable, and not then “science.” Do you see the insanity of this? That’s the politics of science. The word of the researcher and the provenance of his sample means nothing. Modern Science has “ownership” rights these days... and researchers have to have the permission of the “owners” of research subjects to do the research. Such ownership can be traded and sold.
Existence of samples, no matter when they may have been taken, who has them, who may have custody, matters not if someone now claims ownership of the original source of that sample, the legalisms enter in to who, how, what, when, and to what extent examination can be made of that sample, and often by whom. Politics.