Frei's data have not been generally accepted by the

Shroud scientific community partially because STURP was

unable to find pollen on their sticky tapes. The
explanation turned out to be rather simple. STURP, using
a torque applicator which limited the pounds per square
inch pressure on the Shroud, only took samples strictly
from the surface of the cloth. Frei, in a letter to me just
before he passed away, told me he was able to secure
samples of materials from between the threads by
moving the tape (and cloth) laterally, thus lifting the
pollen between the threads up onto the sticky tape. The
tapes themselves still preserve this evidence.
In 1986, through the kind courtesy of Mrs. Gertrud FreiSulzer, the ASSIST organization had access to four of the
tape samples Dr. Frei removed in 1978, plus a fifth,
unlabeled slide, also removed from the Shroud but of
uncertain date. Intense microanalysis of all four of the
labeled samples show that 95% of all the pollen are
localized in the first 1/2 inch or "lead" portion of the tape.
This demonstrates that the sticky tape technique per se is
pressure sensitive, the highest number of pollen on the
tapes coinciding with the highest number of flax fibrils on
those tapes.
Meanwhile, Italian microanalyst Dr. Giovanni Riggi, a
member of STURP, has confirmed the presence of pollen
on the Shroud. But he has not ventured to identify any of
them since his research carried him in directions other
than the study of the pollen. He distinguishes two
different types: "ancient" and "modern" with the former
being identifiable from the mineral coating on them. I had
earlier posed this same issue to Dr. Aharon Horowitz of Tel
Aviv University's Institute of Archaeology, Israel's leading
palynologist. He pointed out to me that in a 1975 study

he made a comparison between the pollen spectrum of

the winds from North Africa with those typical over Israel
and informed me that there is considerable difference. He
adds that the pollen sampling removed from the Shroud
do not conform to the North Africa spectrum but rather
to the Israeli spectrum21.
But there is another facet to the pollen question. Dr. Dahl
has kindly evaluated the entire list of 58 pollen in Dr.
Frei's sampling. He noted that 32 of these are
entomophilous or insect pollinated types. Their
presence, in his opinion, must be due not to windborne deposition but to human activity of some
sort since these pollen types are not transported
any distance at all by wind22.
Steven Shafersman, formerly a student in the field of
micropaleontology at Rice University23, and who is
vigorously outspoken against the authenticity of the
Shroud, was the first to suggest that human activity was
involved. Without any objective foundation he charged
that Dr. Frei himself must have put them there since, in
his opinion, the Shroud cannot be authentic.
Nevertheless, Shafersman makes the following statement
regarding the pollen evidence:
Frei's data are such excellent evidence because pollen
almost invariably falls to the ground within 100 meters of
the parent plant. This phenomenon is used in palynology
and biostratigraphy, for example, to document the
ecological succession of plant communities in a small
land, or in an area subject to warming as continental
glaciers retreat and plant communities migrate
northward. Typically the simultaneous shifts in occurence
and abundance of dozens of plants species