Pollen Deposits
Max Frei, a botanist who worked as a criminalist specialising in forensic analysis examined the Shroud on two occasions, in 1973 and 1978, during which he pressed adhesive tapes against the surface of the Shroud to extract surface dust and other deposits. He found pollen grains when he analysed the dust deposits under a microscope and after five years of careful analysis, he revealed that he had already identified forty-nine different species of plants. Some of these species were plants native to France or Italy but approximately half of them were not found in Europe. There were pollen grains from species that were specific to areas of Palestine, including the Dead Sea area, as well as from plants that are only found in the Anatolia region of Turkey, which is where the city of Urfa, formerly Edessa, is located. He also found pollen from species found only in the area of Istanbul, formerly Constantinople.
He died in 1983 before completing or publishing his research and in the years that followed, some scientists began to doubt his methods and his findings. There were claims that the presence of glue from the made it hard to accurately discern the pollen grain shape and form. However, other specialists who reviewed his work claimed that whilst the glue may have caused errors in his identification of some of the pollen grains, there were still sufficient reliable results to support the conclusion that the Shroud had at some time been in Palestine and Anatolia.
Max Frei’s results were also endorsed by an analysis of dust that had been vacuumed from the back of the Shroud by Giovanni Riggi di Numana during the 1978 STURP examination. Scientists from the University of Padua studied these dust samples between 2009 and 2011 as part of a research project and found pollen in these samples. These grains had not been in contact with adhesive and some of the species identified by this research, such as Phillyrea angustifolia which flowers between March and May, are indigenous to the Middle Eastern areas where the Shroud is believed to have been around 2,000 years ago.
Mineral and Dirt Deposits
During the 1978 STURP test, dirt was unexpectedly found on the Shroud in areas where the cloth would have touched the feet, the left knee and the nose. This is of course consistent with the Christian tradition of Jesus walking barefoot carrying a cross and falling under its weight. Some of the dirt samples that had been collected using sticky tapes were later analysed by Dr. Joseph Kohlbeck, an optical crystallographer who discovered some limestone particles amongst the Shroud’s fibres. He knew that the chemical characteristics of crystals of limestone can often provide information that helps to identify the source location and so he obtained samples from the limestone of the ancient rock-cut tombs in Jerusalem to see if there might be any similarities. He found that both had a crystalline structure that indicated an uncommon form of limestone known as Travertine Aragonite and they both also contained small quantities of iron and strontium, but not lead, which was another unusual similarity.
Dr. Ricardo Levi-Setti of the University of Chicago took this analysis a step further by putting both Shroud and Jerusalem dust samples through his state-of-the-art high-resolution scanning ion microprobe. This confirmed that the samples were an unusually close match.
Once again, some scientists have challenged Kohlbeck’s conclusions but his findings have recently received support from tests made using dust vacuumed from the Shroud. A joint study carried out by the University of Padua and the Geological Survey of Israel compared the Shroud dust with samples taken from underneath the Holy Sepulchre and from Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Many mineral particles were identified including clay particles and some rare quartz particles which were found to be typical of the soil in Jerusalem and also other Mediterranean areas.
Spectral analysis also revealed that several dust particles found at these sites matched particles found on the Shroud with some matching almost perfectly. The team acknowledged that there are other arid areas of the Middle East or Mediterranean which could contain similar minerals in the soil but this evidence clearly points to Jerusalem as the possible source of the dust transferred from the body to the Shroud.
