Political Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
Grouped by the shape of the gap rather than its subject: what sort of thing is unresolved.
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Showing 1 of 608 questions, filtered to 1 specialty.
dating 1
When something happened, where the sources disagree or are silent.
Radiocarbon Dating of the Sudarium of Oviedo
Would a radiocarbon assay of the Sudarium of Oviedo on a decontaminated sample give a different age from the seventh century AD result already published?
Open Radiocarbon Dating of the Sudarium of Oviedo
Why It Is Open The published assay came with the laboratory's own caveat that oils absorbed over centuries of veneration could distort the measured age, and that caveat was never tested. No scholar holds a position on what a clean measurement would show, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement: the work was started, it reached no conclusion, and nobody resumed it.
What Would Settle It A repeat assay on material cleaned by a published decontamination protocol, run blind across more than one laboratory, with the sampling location on the cloth recorded. Independent characterisation of the absorbed organic contaminants would show how large a shift they are capable of producing, which is the part the original caveat left unquantified.
Expertise Needed Radiocarbon dating and archaeometry, with textile conservation science for the decontamination protocol.
Question posed in
The Oviedo Cloth, Mark Guscin.