It has always called my attention that, when talking about the shroud with people who do not know more than what some media publish, they allude to two things to end the conversation: that the dating by carbon 14 (14C) closed the subject and that what is done on the shroud is not science. We will talk about 14C another day.
The question is, what is really syndonology, can we talk about it as science? The problem is that we forget that the shroud is not only a relic or an object of worship. It is also an archaeological object. And this is enough to make it the object of science. And like any archaeological object, it is necessary to carry out a multidisciplinary study to help unravel its mysteries. And this object has many.
As I have heard more than once to Prof. Miñarro, "no archaeological object comes with a dossier of documents under his arm". And this is where the different scientific disciplines come in. History will look for its origin and its path and vicissitudes through time. As a fabric, textile experts will have something to say. As an organic fabric with a large layer of biological contamination, botany has a lot to say. Physics has a huge question mark in the formation of the image. Chemistry will study the alterations it has undergone and apply its dating methods. Medicine faces the greatest challenge with the forensic analysis of blood traces and the man in the image....
These are just a few examples and I have left out other disciplines. It is enough to go to specialized scientific journals and see how many serious scientific papers have been published. I am not talking about books (anyone can publish one) and, much less, about the media (where rigor is, in most cases, non-existent).
I raise another question: Is Egyptology a science in itself? It is also a multidisciplinary study, but no one questions its scientific value. It is not only an archaeological work, but something much broader and more complete.
The same is true of syndonology.
Ignacio Huertas Puerta, CESAN delegate.
There is clearly a huge bias against the Shroud, both in the wider scientific community and among many in the grass roots level. People who assert certainty about the C-14 and say that sindonology is pseudo-science ignore the fact that the Shroud is arguably the most intensely-studied artifact (not just relic) in human history. With all the research that has been put into the Shroud, the explanation for how the image was formed surely would have been discovered by now, but hasn't. That points to the fact (albeit does not proves) that sindonology is NOT pseudo-science.