The 1988 result is the one most people remember. Three labs in Arizona, Oxford, and Zurich tested a small sample of cloth and reported a date range between 1260 and 1390. The story closed with a single sentence in newspapers around the world: the Shroud of Turin is medieval. For most readers, that was the end of the conversation.
What the headlines did not cover is where the sample came from. The strip of cloth handed to the labs was cut from a single corner of the Shroud, an area that researchers have since identified as a region of medieval repair. Cotton fibers were found woven into a cloth that is otherwise pure linen. The repair is consistent with the kind of mending done after the 1532 Chambéry fire, when nuns patched the Shroud in several places. If the sample is mostly repair material, the date returned is the date of the repair, not the date of the original cloth.
Recent work using WAXS X-ray crystallography reaches a different conclusion. Unlike radiocarbon, WAXS measures the crystalline aging of cellulose, which can be calibrated against linen samples of known age. Tested directly on Shroud fibers from the original weave, the technique places the cloth in the first century. That is the result the 1988 sampling could not have produced regardless of method, because the wrong fibers were tested.
The original story persists because the original story is simple. “Carbon dating says medieval” fits in a headline. “The sample was taken from a repaired corner and the underlying linen has not been re-tested with the original protocol” does not. Updated science rarely outruns a clean line of copy from forty years earlier.
The book lays out the full chain of evidence: the 1988 protocol, the sampling location, the repair analysis, the WAXS results, and the half-dozen other tests that have refined the picture since. Readers can decide for themselves what the data adds up to. That is the whole point.