As is well known, when the radiocarbon sample was originally cut from a corner of the Shroud, it was first trimmed of debris and then cut into two, one piece for retention by Turin and the other to be subdivided for the laboratories. The first sub-division, given to Arizona, was about 40mg, and the other two, to the other labs, about 50mg each. To even the scales, another, approximately 10mg was cut from the retained piece and added to Arizona’s sample.
In the video of the sampling, we can see the extra Arizona piece being cut from the ‘riserva,’ weighed with the other Arizona piece, and placed in a Petri dish labelled S.1. ready to be placed in its metal capsule for transportation to the USA.
A – the smaller Arizona sample being cut from the ‘riserva’ portion.
B – the same photo, emphasising what can be seen of the ‘herring-bones’ and (red) the position of the ‘spine.’
C – Both Arizona samples being weighed – 0.0539 g.
D – Both Arizona samples in Petri dish S.1.
From these and other photos I speculated in 2019 that the smaller Arizona sample may have come from the ‘other end’ of the riserva piece than is usually supposed, and in 2020 David Maier, using careful graphic reconstruction, more or less proved it. See ‘Shroud of Turin: C-14 Arizona 2 Sample Revised Zone of Collection,’ at academia.edu. Here is his reconstruction:
When it arrived in Tucson, Douglas Donahue opened the metal capsule and took a rather poor snap of the samples.
The smaller fragment was then kept and reserved by Donahue, and not submitted to the dating procedure. It has only recently been examined, nearly 40 years later, after Donahue’s death, by one of the original Tucson team, Timothy Jull, together with Rachel Freer-Waters, and details published in ‘Analysis of Textile Fragments from the 1988 Radiocarbon Samples of the Turin Shroud’ (Heritage Science, one of the Nature portfolio, 2026). A photo of the Donahue sample, now called A1A, looks like this:
From the shape of the herring-bone ‘spine,’ left of centre, we can see that this is the non-image side of the Shroud, and that the horizontal threads are not the warp, which runs the whole length of the Shroud, but the weft. In order to fit it into a conventional reconstruction, it must be ‘flipped,’ rotated 90°, and the warp threads reconstructed from the visible parts of them visible here.
Blue – warp threads; Red – the herring-bone ‘spine.’
Now we can fit this to the riserva portion of the sample, and note where it fits:
And finally the whole thing can be added to the overall reconstruction of the radiocarbon sample area.
The coloured lines are ten, twenty and thirty threads away from the ‘spine’ marked in red.