Divinity Atlas
A Radiocarbon Test Was Meant to Answer This. It Left the Question Open Instead
Metaphysics and Matter and Sacred Objects, Dress and Symbols, two sections of this atlas, connect at only two points site-wide. This is one of them: the Sudarium of Oviedo, a bloodstained relic, fixed to the radiocarbon test run on its own cloth, a test that answered a much later date than tradition claims and then qualified its own finding.
A Cloth Without an Image
The Sudarium of Oviedo is a small bloodstained linen cloth, carrying no image at all, venerated as the face or head cloth wrapped around the head of Jesus after death, as mentioned in John 20:7. It is kept in the Camara Santa of Oviedo Cathedral, inside the reliquary chest known as the Arca Santa. Unlike the Shroud of Turin, it bears stains of blood and other fluid but no figural imprint of any kind, which is exactly what makes its own dating a separate question from the Shroud's.
A Result the Laboratory Itself Would Not Call Settled
Radiocarbon testing of the cloth returned a date in the region of the seventh century AD, long after the first-century period the tradition claims for it. The laboratory entered a caveat with its own result: the cloth had absorbed oils across centuries of handling and veneration, and contamination of that kind can shift a measured radiocarbon age. The finding has therefore never been treated as a settled determination of the cloth's antiquity, and no repeat assay on a decontaminated sample has been published. What the study established is that the question is open, not that it is answered, and the atlas records it exactly that way rather than reading the raw date as the last word.