The carbon dating debate gets most of the attention, but it is far from the only line of evidence on the table. One of the quietest and most stubborn pieces is the pollen.
In the 1970s and again in the 1990s, researchers used adhesive tape to lift dust and fiber from the surface of the Shroud. Among the linen threads they found pollen grains, and the species mix is what makes the result hard to wave away. Several of the identified plants are native to the Jerusalem corridor and the surrounding region. A handful do not grow in Europe at all. If the cloth originated in medieval France or Italy, the pollen profile should look like medieval France or Italy. It does not.
There is also a small but real cluster of pollen from plants that bloom in spring, which lines up with the Passover timing of the burial described in the Gospels. That detail is harder to weigh because it depends on assumptions about how long the cloth was left exposed and where, but it adds rather than subtracts from the geographic story.
What pollen cannot do is fix a date. It can place a textile in a region, and it can identify environments the textile passed through, but it does not run a clock the way carbon does. So the pollen evidence is not a direct counter to the 1988 result. It is a separate piece of the picture, and it points east. Combined with the bloodstain analysis, the weave pattern, and the WAXS retesting, it forms a chain that the medieval-forgery story has to argue against on every link, not just one.
The book lays out each line of evidence and lets readers decide how much weight to give it. The pollen chapter is one of my favorites because it is small, specific, and almost impossible to fake.