Ancient Web: Shroud.com Put Decades of Turin Shroud Research Online

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Long before every historical controversy had a subreddit, YouTube ecosystem and six people yelling into microphones, Barrie Schwortz built a website and started putting the documents in one place.

Visit the Shroud of Turin Website

Schwortz had been the documenting photographer for the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project, usually called STURP. He later created Shroud.com to preserve and distribute photographs, research papers, historical material and ongoing discussion surrounding the cloth kept in Turin that bears the image of a crucified man.

The site's own history places its public launch on January 21, 1996. In 2026 it marked thirty years online.

That is a serious lifespan for a specialized website.

The useful part is the archive, not a demand that you believe it

The Shroud's authenticity remains disputed. The website itself presents the central question plainly: is the cloth genuinely connected to Jesus of Nazareth, or is it a medieval artifact? A responsible reader should not convert the existence of a large research archive into proof of either position.

What Shroud.com unquestionably does provide is an unusually deep record of the debate.

Its library includes historical scientific material, presentations, photographs, conference papers and archived specialist publications. It hosts issues of Shroud News from 1980-2001 and Shroud Spectrum International from 1981-1993, along with extensive material related to STURP and later research. Schwortz's own photographs became especially important because he was physically present during the 1978 examination.

The site's history is also pure old Web. In 1998 Schwortz wrote about bandwidth costs becoming a major expense and splitting large pages into smaller ones so visitors could load them faster. A CD-ROM project was being developed because distributing a large body of high-resolution research material online was still technologically awkward.

Today those constraints sound quaint. The preservation work does not.

Schwortz died in 2024, but the site continued under the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association. That continuity demonstrates one of the hardest problems in independent digital archives: surviving the person who built them.

Whether you approach the Shroud as a religious relic, archaeological problem, art-historical mystery or case study in scientific controversy, the website is valuable because it preserves the paper trail.

That is exactly what the Web was always good at when somebody stubborn enough kept maintaining the links.

Explore the Shroud.com research archive

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.