I hardly expected a reply to my last letter, communications from heaven to man being so intermittent these days, but a recent flurry of posts by Joe Marino on academia.edu seems to constitute the next best thing. They are:
- ‘Raymond Rogers’ Communications to the Shroud Science Group on the Anomalous Nature of the C-14 Corner.’
- ‘APPENDIX TO: Raymond Rogers’ Communications to the Shroud Science Group on the Anomalous Nature of the C-14 Corner.’
- ‘Raymond Rogers’ Explosive Studies of the Turin Shroud.’
The first comprises your contribution to a paper published just after your death in March 2005, called ‘Evidences for Testing Hypotheses about the Body Image Formation of the Turin Shroud,’ and gives a concise summary of your ideas. The second is a comprehensive collections of emails to the Shroud Science Group, explaining your thinking in much more detail; and the third consists mostly of your emails to Sue Benford and Joe Marino. Of necessity, the last two are often repetitious, as you replied to different correspondents with similar sentiments, but they illustrate your thinking and feelings well, and contain some interesting insights not included in the first paper.
In the second paper, you list what Joe calls “ten solid reasons why the C-14 corner differs from the Shroud’s main part,” and although I do not intend to discuss each one individually, I believe it will help if I precis them here.
1). The C-14 corner does not fluoresce. The rest of the Shroud does.
2). The C-14 corner is coated with “gum-dye-mordant.” The rest of the Shroud isn’t.
3). The C-14 corner has little lignin at its growth nodes because it was bleached in a different way.
4). The C-14 corner has vanillin in its lignin. The rest of the Shroud doesn’t.
5). The C-14 corner contains interwoven cotton. The rest of the Shroud doesn’t.
6). The C-14 corner contains aluminium and madder root dye. The rest of the Shroud doesn’t.
7). The C-14 corner contains alizarin and purpurin. The rest of the Shroud doesn’t.
8). The C-14 corner changes colour in hydrochloric acid. The rest of the Shroud doesn’t.
9). The C-14 corner is coated with gum Arabic. The rest of the Shroud isn’t.
10). The C-14 corner contains at least one “end-to-end splice”. The rest of the Shroud doesn’t.
These “ten solid reasons” boil down to three.
1). The C-14 corner does not fluoresce. The rest of the Shroud does.
2, 6, 7, 8, 9). The C-14 corner is coated with a mixture of madder root extract and an aluminium mordant embedded in a gum arabic medium. The rest of the Shroud isn’t.
3, 4, 5, 10). The C-14 corner contains interwoven cotton, and more lignin than the rest of the Shroud.
FLUORESCENCE
I’d like, if I may, to start with the fluorescence, as it constitutes very prominent, often-repeated, evidence for your hypothesis that colour was added to the interwoven threads, in order to match them to the original linen of the Shroud. Perhaps your most succinct comment (from the second paper, 23 October 2003) is:
“Any photograph taken in visible light should show something close to uniformity through the Raes and radiocarbon sampling area. If that area was stained in an attempt to match the older cloth, making it look identical was the goal. The more interesting observation is made by looking at the ultraviolet-fluorescence photograph. The entire area looks different. The entire area of the Raes and radiocarbon samples is significantly darker than the main part of the cloth: it does not fluoresce like the main cloth. Fluorescence is a function of the chemical structures on a surface. The sample area cannot have the same chemical composition as the main cloth.”
Here are two photographs of that area, in visible and ultraviolet fluorescence respectively.
I guess it is a moot point as to whether the photo taken in visible light shows “something close to uniformity through the Raes and radiocarbon sampling area,” compared to the photo taken in UV, although the darkening of that area is certainly more pronounced in the latter. This, you emphasise, several times throughout the three papers, “shows that the area cut for the radiocarbon
sample was anomalous. […] Since fluorescence is a result of chemical structures, the chemical composition of the radiocarbon sample was not representative of the Shroud.” (Paper 3, 10 August 2003)
Fair enough, I guess, although I’m not perfectly clear whether you think the discolouration is due to the interpolated threads, the surface coating, or a combination of the two. However, in none of your mentions of fluorescence do you suggest that the, much more noticeable, difference in fluorescence between two areas of the Holland cloth might also be due to chemical anomaly. Quite the reverse; you are at pains to point out that “none of the AD 1534 Holland cloth samples showed a gum coating”(Paper 2, 22 August 2003). So if the very marked difference in colour between the main part of the Holland cloth and the white, highly fluorescent part is not due to a coating of some sort, what is it? It is a pity you do not even mention it, let alone characterise it.
Elsewhere among your communications you mention the “blue mosaic photographs that were taken by Vern Miller (STURP) in 1978. You describe one of them thus:
“The small white triangular-shaped area is where the Raes sample was cut in 1973. The radiocarbon sample was cut parallel to the seam, and its bottom end started at the Raes sample. The two samples should have been quite similar in composition. Notice that the radiocarbon area shows a distinctly different reflectance than the adjoining cloth. This provides another piece of evidence that the radiocarbon sample was not representative of the main part of the Shroud. The 1988 date was not valid.”
Here is the image you were describing:
You are quite right that the bottom right hand corner, including Raes area, the radiocarbon area and an exposed area of Holland cloth (apart from the bright white triangle) are dark green, which certainly contrasts with the orange/yellow of the adjacent cloth. However, if you insist that the “distinctly different reflectance … provides another piece of evidence that the radiocarbon sample was not representative of the main part of the Shroud,” then I’m surprised you do not seem to have noticed the broad blue band occupying the upper third of the whole image. If the difference between green and yellow indicates difference in chemical composition, then surely the difference between blue and yellow must indicate another difference in chemical composition, mustn’t it? And if, in fact, the broad blue band is chemically meaningless, then surely the green corners are meaningless too. No?
Now, I think you’re on slightly stronger ground with the “gum-dye-mordant” you mention in Paper 1. Your microphotographs do seem to show a translucent swelling gel with a reddish colour, which I have not seen on photomicrographs of the sticky tape samples. However you describe the coating on the radiocarbon sample as “a gum that contained both dyes and mordants (common technology through millennia for dyeing linen).” This description is a little confusing – and perhaps a little confused. Traditionally, as several websites describe, cloth to be dyed with madder is first mordanted with alum, and then the mordanted cloth added to the madder in a bucket or container. The two processes are not simultaneous and no gum is necessary. The dye is colour-fast and can’t be washed off.
However, in this case, if the very white areas of the Holland cloth – exposed because of pieces being cut off the side-strip for souvenirs – were stained to make them fit the Shroud better, then the term ‘dyeing’ is inappropriate. It looks as if you are thinking of Madder Lake, which is a pigment, which can be made by mixing madder with alum and sodium carbonate. This could then be painted on, or smeared on, as you suggest, in a gum medium if required, and perhaps it was. It would also easily come off in water, which is what you reported.
ALUMINIUM
An anomaly, which, forgive me, suggests an unfamiliarity with artist’s methods and materials, is your repeated comment that the mordant was made of hydrous aluminium oxide. I cannot find that, and you do not give evidence that, aluminium oxide was ever used as a mordant. What was common was alum, which is potassium aluminium sulphate. The relative atomic masses of the potassium, aluminium and sulphur in alum are 39, 29 and 64. There is over twice as much sulphur, by mass, as aluminium in alum. I mention this because the only source of information about aluminium found on the Shroud is from some experiments detailed in ‘Further Spectroscopic Investigations of Samples of the Shroud of Turin,’ by Alan Adler, Russell, Seltzer, and Frank DeBlase, in 2000. Numerous samples from areas of non-image, water stain, scorch, image, blood, serum, backing cloth and the radiocarbon sample, as well as various controls were isolated for investigation, and FTIR spectra were derived from all of them. However, only non-image, water stain and radiocarbon areas were analysed into their respective elements, which is a pity. Table 1 of the paper lists proportional elemental compositions of three individual radiocarbon fibres, and “typical” water stain and non-image fibres. Why image and blood fibres were not included is not explained. Here is the table:
To be honest, simply grabbing the aluminium values from this, without considering the data as a whole, does not suggest complete impartiality. You say, formally, “SEM x-ray analyses of fibres from the area (Adler) show twice the aluminum concentration of normal shroud fibres” (Paper 1), which is fair enough, and also “his Table … shows that warp yarns in the radiocarbon area contain at least ten (10) times the amount of aluminium as found in the rest of the cloth” (Paper 2, 20 October 2003). However, Adler also insisted that the non-image fibres consisted of almost nothing except the cellulose of the flax, whereas the radiocarbon samples were heavily encrusted, so let’s consider the Table as a whole. If the Shroud is mostly pure cellulose, then an elemental analysis of a clean part of it should record about equal proportions of carbon and oxygen (9:10). For a non-image fibre to be 93% carbon and only 3% oxygen is wholly incredible, and casts serious doubt over the entire analysis. But what casts even more doubt is that fact that neither Adler nor yourself commented on it. It is inconceivable that you did not notice, and that, I’m afraid, casts a shadow over your entire assessment. Are there varying proportions of aluminium on the Shroud? On the basis of this Table, it is impossible to say.
Returning to the fact that there is twice as much sulphur as aluminium in alum, we note the two warp threads gave proportions of twice to three times as much aluminium as sulphur, although the weft thread was approximately correct. Similarly, there should be a little more potassium than aluminium, 1.3 times as much, but instead we have twice, three times, and twenty-one times as much. Again, it is not so much the random nature of these proportions as your, surely deliberate, failure to discuss them, which draws your whole hypothesis into disrepute.
Of mordants, you say (Paper 2, 3 July 2003) “Mordants are used to stick the dyes to fibers, and they have been used for thousands of years. Mordants stick better to cotton than linen, and cotton was often added to yarn to make it take dyes better.” I know of no evidence that this statement is true, and you don’t give any. Modern websites do not discriminate between the two.
MADDER
With these uncertainties hovering over us, we turn to your claim that the colourant for the radiocarbon corner is madder. Rather to our surprise, you give no evidence for this at all. You mention alizarin and purpurin, but do not explain any chemical tests that substantiated your guess. Incredibly, you say: “Mordants other than AlO(OH) produce different colours with Madder root dye. Calcium compounds produce blue colours, and a few blue lakes can be seen on some gum-coated fibres. They are removed with 6N HCL. The colour suggests alizarin on crystals of calcite or aragonite in the threads.” This is surely grasping at straws. Were two mordants used? To produce blue as well as red on the radiocarbon corner? Of course none of this is true: calcium carbonate is often used with madder to intensify its red colour, not to turn it blue. In short, although the reddish substance we can see on you photographs might easily be madder, you do not actually provide any evidence that it is.
GUM ARABIC
Shall we look at the alleged plant-gum? Yes, because the thoroughness of your analysis here rather dramatically contrasts with the weakness of the evidence for alum and madder. The gum can be seen visually to swell and soften in water. It is hydrolyzed by either HCl or NaOH, which “suggest that it is probably a polysaccharide and not a denatured protein … probably a pentosan. Pentosan plant gums form a reversible, bright-yellow color with aqueous iodine. … Both Raes and radiocarbon samples give this reaction.”
There is also some less credible evidence from mass spectra, of Shroud fibres and of radiocarbon fibres, which you claimed showed that furfural was generated at high temperatures on the former but low temperatures on the latter. But these are your graphs:
Cellulose, you say, pyrolyzes to produce hydroxymethylfurfural (mass 126 [blue dot]), which begins to deformylate in a series reaction to produce furfural (mass 96 [red dot]). Pentosans do not produce hydroxymethylfurfural (mass 126 [blue dot]). They also pyrolyze much faster at lower temperatures than cellulose. When the first pyrolysis products appeared during heating, the Raes fibres showed a signal for furfural at mass 96 [red dot].
But wait a bit. Is that it? The two spectra are completely different. Even if it was heavily contaminated, the Raes sample was mostly cellulose, which should have decomposed in a similar way to the Shroud image sample. What is that huge peak at 131 on the Shroud spectrum? And what is that series of descending peaks from 56 to 111 on the Raes spectrum? Once again, the comparison turns out to be largely meaningless, and once again, I’m sorry to say, your failure to account for it is suspicious. From all the evidence that you provide, it looks very much as if you first came to some kind of conclusion as to what the gum-dye-mordant might be, and then selectively trawled the evidence for substantiation of the hypothesis.
Well, no matter, there does seem to be a gum of some sort, and a pigment of some sort, which might suggest that some sort of colouring of the radiocarbon corner is actually present. However, you are well aware that whatever it was could not have had much effect on the radiocarbon date, as for a start there wasn’t much, and for a second most if not all of it would have been washed off in the cleaning treatment. Sensibly, you say: “I never claimed that the chemical differences affected the date” (Paper 2, 14 October 2003), and “The date obtained by each laboratory should have represented the amount of 14C in the sample that laboratory received. It almost certainly did. There was almost certainly no significant contribution from contamination” (Paper 2, 29 March 2004). You were only using the contamination as evidence that the underlying material was different from the rest of the Shroud, but there, I’m afraid, you’re on even weaker ground.
COTTON
Everything now depends on your observation of anomalous cotton in the radiocarbon corner, which you do not think is present in the rest of the Shroud. The question is, how do you know?
The only threads to have been quantitively analysed for the presence of cotton are “Raes #7,” by Thibault Heimburger, and “F15001,” also from the radiocarbon corner, by Giulio Fanti. Heimburger determined that “R7 is definitely some kind of blended thread: cotton (10%-20%)/ linen (80-90%),” while Fanti decided that “the relatively small percentage of cotton fibers of (4/188 =) 2.1% is in agreement with the hypothesis that cotton was a contaminant in the ambient where linen threads were prepared.” This is contradictory, and hardly conclusive.
Discussion with medieval textile experts suggests no evidence that “blended” thread was ever a “thing” in ancient times, although blended cloth, with a flax warp and cotton weft, became common during the Middle Ages. In a comment on an article by Gilbert Raes in Shroud Spectrum International, Dorothy Crispino wrote: “Until the advent of the Industrial Era, spinning and weaving were carried out in the same room, where piles of raw cotton would be heaped in one corner, piles of flax in another. Cotton fibers float about everywhere and stick to anything they touch. Spinners often twisted fibers by rolling them against the thigh, where, on the spinners’ long skirts, cotton lint had wafted. Cotton fibers, then, would quite legitimately be incorporated inside the flax. I am grateful to Hilda Leynen for this glimpse into the ancient arts of Minerva.” (Shroud Spectrum International, Issue 38/39, 1991, at shroud.com) Any cotton found in the Shroud threads is either aventitious, during the spinning, weaving, or subsequent handling of the cloth; or, as is fervently hoped by advocates of the “invisible mending” theory, created by the twisting together of a cotton thread with a linen one. This would have been extremely easy to test. You declared that you could clearly see such a ‘splice’ on Raes #1, so a simple optical examination of the fibres at each end under a microscope could have revealed any difference in material, if there was one. The absence of this examination is, I’m afraid, indicative.
Instead, you passed Raes #1 over to Robert Villarreal for analysis. He didn’t look at it as a whole either, but subjected both ends to a series of analyses, deciding eventually that both ends were cotton. This has been disputed even by authenticists, as it makes no sense for anybody to glue two strands of cotton together in the context of the Shroud. Villarreal also identified the various metallic elements on his sample: aluminium was not a significant contributor. Villarreal presented his findings at the Ohio conference in 2010; four years later, at St Louis, he changed his mind and decided that his results did not distinguish between linen and cotton.
Other threads were given to John Brown (‘Microscopical Investigation of Selected Raes Threads From the Shroud of Turin,’ 2005, shroud.com), an electron microscopist. He says that one fragment of thread he was given was Raes #7, which he describes as a weft thread. As we can see below, #7 is a warp thread, with distinct kinks, which are not visible in John Brown’s sample, suggesting that the name is wrong, although the weft description is correct. He was also given #14, which is also straight and unkinked, and thus also a weft thread. It would have been trivial to tease apart the ends and check proportions of cotton, but this wasn’t done. Instead single fibres were isolated, which cannot be demonstrated to represent the whole. He does appear to have embedded a bit of thread in plastic and sliced transverse section from it for SEM investigation. It would have been trivial to look at it with an optical microscope and count the respective fibres at each end, but this wasn’t done.
Nevertheless, anybody can see that there is cotton among the microfibres in photos of the radiocarbon corner – and anybody can see that there is cotton among the sticky tape slides of all the other areas of the Shroud. To demonstrate that one area is different from another, we need to show that it is interwoven in the radiocarbon corner, but simply lying on the surface on the rest for the Shroud. This cannot be done just be looking at sticky tape slides. A thread should be teased apart and examined, and you seem to have been given a suitable thread, called the Zina thread, extracted from the region of the heel in 1973. But it seems to have got lost…
In Paper 3, you say (email to Sue Benford, 13 Sept 2001): “I don’t know what Al found in the samples I sent him. Unfortunately, I also sent him the Zina threads.” This surely implies that the thread/s were actually in your possession. However, throughout your shroudscience emails, you say, of the samples received from Gonella (3 July 2003), “The Zina thread was totally missing from its container,” and later (1 Aug 2003), “on 27-28 March 1980 I did some testing for pentose sugars on Raes and Shroud samples. STURP was gathered at the Air Force Academy to run tests on the tape samples, Zina thread (which had mysteriously disappeared from its package), and Raes samples.” This suggests that the Zina thread should have been in your possession in 1980, presumably as part of the 1978 STuRP investigation, but there is no mention of it – or its absence – in any of the published STuRP papers. Later still (23 Oct 2003), you comment “I do not have any complete yarn-segment samples from the Shroud. Baima Bollone was allowed to cut some yarn segments. Perhaps he could comment on their composition. The Zina thread was picked to pieces and (apparently) stolen before the sample container made it to me.”
If you never received any Zina thread, then how did you send them (plural) to Al Adler, and how did you know they had been picked to pieces?
In a BSTS Newsletter (No. 55, 2002) You wrote, “Luigi Gonella of Turin brought us several threads from the Raes samples and what was left of a Zina thread.” Well, did he or didn’t he?
Furthermore, in 2004, you wrote (in ‘Pyrolysis/Mass Spectrometry Applied to the Shroud of Turin’), that a Zina thread was tested at the Midwest Center for Mass Spectrometry, and later (in ‘Testing the Jackson “Theory” of Image Formation’), that “The graph shows the spectrum that was taken at the lowest temperature that gave detectable products from a blood-spotted Zina thread. Hydroxyproline gave the distinct m/e 131 peak.”
Once again, there is a culpable failure to establish what could easily have been established by simple microscopy. The question of cotton on the Shroud has not been settled, and the idea that any of the threads you received might be of different compositions at each end even less so.
Of your attempts to demonstrate differing amounts of lignin on the radiocarbon corner from the rest of the Shroud, I shall not repeat myself here, as I covered the topic in detail in my previous letter.
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Moving on, I think I ought to take issue with your repeated, and increasingly disparaging, denigration of Mechthild Flury-Lemberg. In Paper 2, she is mentioned on 9 pages, with comments like: “Without adequate testing, she was fooled” (1 July 2003), “I seriously doubt Flury-Lemberg’s credentials to make pronouncements on the chemical properties of the radiocarbon sample” (ibid.), “It was easy to find chemical differences between the Raes sample and the main part of the Shroud. Mechtild Flury-Lemberg and the cardinal do not accept this” (1 August 2003), “Its color [of a Raes fibre] is nearly a perfect match to the color of the ancient cloth (enough to fool Flury-Lemberg and Testore)” (22 August 2003), “Is the testimony of an expert without analyses as believable as repeatable chemical or physical analyses?” (7 September 2003 – actually dated 2022 but this must be a typo), “Vial, Flury-Lemberg, and Testori are “experts.” The custodians of the Shroud believe in infallibility of “experts.” End of story” (20 March 2004).
I think this is unfair. For a start Flury-Lemberg did not make “pronouncements on the chemical properties of the radiocarbon sample.” She did not depart from her field of expertise here. Unlike yourself, she was very familiar with medieval and renaissance ‘invisible mending;’ she knew very well just how invisible it was (not at all under close scrutiny); and, unlike yourself, she was able to report, from her observations of both sides of the Shroud, that no such interweaving was visible. You yourself surely agree with her that ‘interweaving,’ in the sense of one thread being laid alongside another, is not visible on the Shroud, and rely entirely on your claims regarding the “splicing” of one thread into another, which, I’m afraid, you have not demonstrated satisfactorily. Your chemical tests, after all, apply almost exclusively to the colouring matter, not to the material substrate. For that, all you needed to do was to look closely at (and to photograph, of course) the two ends of a couple of threads, which, in spite of having 14 to choose from, neither you, nor Robert Villareal, nor John Brown, bothered to do. This smacks of obfuscation, not clarity.
If Flury-Lemberg were alive, she would no doubt take issue with your characterisation of the Raes threads you received from Luigi Gonella. Here is your photo of them, and below your comments, and mine – [in square brackets and italic].
“The splice, Raes #1, is in the lower left corner. You can see that it is straight. Notice that many of the other pieces of yarn show distinct, periodic bends. They correspond to the 1:3 spacing of the weave, and they were compressed into the yarn segment. They are almost certainly weft yarns. [No. They are much longer than the straighter samples, and the distinct periodic bends match warp yarns in the sample I have had made for me.] The straight segments are almost certainly warp yarns, which were held under tension during weaving. [No, they are almost certainly weft yarns, as their relative shortness, and similarity to the weft yarns own my own replica confirm.] Can any of our textile experts make comments on whether warp yarn was ever spliced as a loom was being strung? It would seem logical that an unspliced, unbroken length of yarn would be used to string the loom.
The following segments seemed to be clearly weft: #7, #8, and #11. [No. They are warp.] The following segments seemed to be clearly warp: #1, #6, and #10 [The first two are thicker and shorter, and clearly weft; the third is tighter, may have the periodic bends in it, and is probably longer than it seems, as one end is cut off. It is probably warp.] (#9 has a straight portion, but it is very tightly twisted and kinked on one end. I will look again to determine whether it is a splice.) [The contorted end is probably where it was rolled up in the hem at the bottom of the sample or the seam at the side; I can’t tell if it is warp or weft.]
Numbers 6 and 10 were destroyed in laser experiments on the “flash-of-light” hypothesis. Intense flashes ablate the cellulose surface, and a few tests reduced the sample to microscopic dust. No image colors were obtained. We did not know at the time that the composition of the Raes sample(s) was different from that of the main part of the Shroud.
One half of #8 was given to Giulio Fanti. [This may be the one he split open and counted 4 cotton among the 188 linen fibres.]
Number 12 was given to Al Adler. It was a good, long, colored warp thread. I have been told that it was used for an unauthorized attempt at dating. Can anyone comment on that? I had sworn that none of the samples would be used for dating, and all members of STURP were aware of this legal document. [Several conflicting claims have been made, none of them credible.]
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EXPERTS
In the three papers, you refer to experts some two dozen times, mostly in increasingly disparaging terms. I’m not sure you do yourself and favour in comparing your own expertise with others’.
Your own findings, which as I have shown above are tenuous, were contradicted by Gabriel Vial, who saw no reweaving in 1988, and by Mechthild Flury Lemberg, who saw no reweaving in 2002. The first was a professor at the School of Weaving at Lyons University and the director of the Centre International d’Étude des Textiles Anciens (CIETA), and the second was textile restorer at the Bavarian National Museum, the Bern Historical Museum and the Abegg Foundation Museum in Riggisberg. Both were at the top of their professions when they studied the Shroud and saw no mending. The main reason for this is because there was no evidence of threads being systematically laid alongside each other, in the manner of invisible mending, and, of course, they did not acknowledge the splicing which you claimed to see. This is how you describe them: “Apparently all it takes to support the hoax hypothesis is the unsupported word of some “textile experts.” Appeal to authority can overcome the evidence of several independent scientists” (1 August 2003). This is a rather petty distortion, if I may say so, especially in the light of your own failure clearly to demonstrate cotton/linen splicing although you had every opportunity to do so.
You make valid points, and are not the first to do so, firstly that ‘experts’ should not be allowed to get away with claims merely on account of their celebrity, and secondly, that expertise in one field does not equate to expertise in any other. Unfortunately, your posts increasingly demonstrate your own culpability in both these respect. Your statement: “I am considered to be an “expert.” I could not afford to be wrong” (17 October 2003) rings slightly hollow in view of the list of claims you make regarding the nature of flax fibres (which you seem to think grow “like bamboo” and whose central hollow you invariably misname the medulla instead of the lumen); the history of antique bleaching methods (which you seem to confuse with dyeing: bleaching, which mostly involves leaving the material under sunlight, is historically described as being done as whole cloth, while dyeing, involving steeping material in liquid, is historically described as being done by the hank, before weaving); an over reliance on demonstrably imprecise element counts, and bland statements of authority unsupported by any evidence at all, such as your conviction that madder was used to stain the radiocarbon corner.
As often before, I very much regret that we cannot debate these ideas in person. I feel sure that such a conversation would have been vigorous, entertaining, and perhaps enlightening for us both.
Best wishes,
Hugh