Meacham, William
William
Meacham is an archaeologist specializing in South China. He has
extensively studied the carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin and has
found it wanting as he tells in his acclaimed book, The Rape of the
Shroud.
From the Hong Kong University Press:
He has written or edited seven books on archaeology, including Rock Carvings in Hong Kong: An Illustrated and Interpretive Study (1976) and Archaeology in Hong Kong (1980), as well as books on English teaching and on the Shroud of Turin. He has published extensively on various aspects of South China archaeology in peer-reviewed international journals including Antiquity, Asian Perspectives, Archaeology, World Archaeology, Current Anthropology, and Journal of Chinese Linguistics. He has also written on subjects related to the Turin Shroud in Current Anthropology, Biblical Archaeologist, and Michigan Quarterly Review. His other research interests are the origins of the Austronesian-speaking peoples and genealogy.
William Meacham has lived in Hong Kong since 1970, holding positions at the Hong Kong Museum of History and the Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture. Since 1980, he has been Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre of Asian Studies, the University of Hong Kong. He was editor of the Hong Kong Archaeological Society (1973–85) and chairman of the society (1985–96). He has directed more than thirty archaeological excavations in Hong Kong and Macau on government or private contract. The largest of these was the sixteen-month survey and salvage excavation of Chek Lap Kok island, site of Hong Kong's new airport, from 1991 to 1992.
We get a picture of the author from his summary of The Rape of Shroud:
The book begins with the Shroud at the pinnacle of its prestige in the early 1980s, when millions of people, including a respectable number of academics and scientists, considered it quite possibly the actual burial cloth of Christ with a mysterious imprint of His body. This perception changed almost overnight with the announcement in 1988 that Carbon-14 dating had produced an age of around 1260-1390 A.D. for the cloth. The relic was wrongly condemned, however, since the dating was poorly planned, marred by petty rivalries, and scientifically flawed.
The final stage in the desecration was a travesty carried out by aggressive "restorers" in 2002. Valuable scientific data was irretrievably destroyed, opportunities for research squandered, materials taken from the cloth without stringent controls, and repairs dating from 1534 that constituted part of the Shroud's visual heritage were removed. This so-called "restoration" was conducted totally in secret, engineered by a small clique around the archbishop of Turin. It has been roundly condemned by most Shroud researchers as a conservation and scientific disaster. The relic and its study have been altered forever.
These things should not have happened. The reasons behind them are complicated, and I have tried to reconstruct the sequence of events and its causes, based on my own knowledge and notes, plus the accounts of others.