More than 35 years ago, archaeologists poking about in the mouth of the Rambla Cervera river, south of Barcelona, found two large concretions of old iron, badly corroded, clogged with sand and fused solid with calcareous depositions. The lumps turned out to be stacks of helmets, of rather generic types, but which were tentatively identified, on the basis of the large number of broken pottery amphorae and other vessels round about, to have come from a Roman shipwreck, bringing wine, grain, salted fish and assorted kitchenware to a couple of prominent local settlements that declined towards the end of the first century BC.
Since then, a more detailed study of the helmets has raised doubts about their date. Although most are, on stylistic grounds, not easy to pin down, some characteristics of the rims and ridges have suggested that a late medieval attribution is more probable.
Astonishingly, in few cases, shreds of textile linings to these helmets have been preserved, and although on contamination grounds possibly the worst possible subjects for radiocarbon dating, having spent hundreds of years underwater, embedded in sand between corroding iron and lime deposition, nevertheless fragments were carefully surgically removed and sent to Beta Analytic, Miami, and Curt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archäometrie (CEZA), Mannheim. The linings were made of bast fibres, probably either flax or hemp, Z-spun and tabby-woven, about 17 threads per centimetre.
And here are the results:
Four of the samples are well matched, and one anomalous one has raised doubts about unremoved contamination, in spite of it having the same cleaning treatment as the others. A possible explanation is that all the helmets were all from around 1300-1400, but that the anomalous one had been given a replacement lining in 1500-1600, after which the ship carrying them had sunk. Another is that four of the helmets were in a position to have been buried quite quickly, while the anomalous one, projecting above the sand, had been subject to more intrusive contamination.
Remarkably, it seems, the extensive first century BC Roman context turns out to be completely unrelated.
‘Twere tedious to rehearse comparisons between these helmets and the Shroud, so I won’t, but leave it to the reader to make of it what he/she will. To make it easier, though, here are the Shroud’s dates made into a diagram in the same style as that above.
