Recreating Lost Scents and Smells
Smell – maybe even more so than visuals – can be an extremely effective transporter to another time and space.
Although the sense of smell might be an underappreciated sense for many, olfaction (the elegant word for smell) is really important for understanding the world and navigating our environment. Humans have developed the sense of smell so that we could detect foods we would enjoy eating, as well as alert us to health hazards, so much that neuroscientists have discovered that human beings can smell ten different essential categories of odours. “Chemical” smells include kerosene and ammonia, whilst grass and mushrooms were “woody,” and butter and molasses – in an appealing choice of name – were considered “popcorn” smells.
The Dutch Proverbs by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The painting captures some of the visual richness we can imagine characterised Europe hundreds of years ago - and some of the scents that might have been found in its bustling cities. Image: Wikimedia Commons
For some people afflicted by Covid-19, these different odours have temporarily changed or entirely disappeared from their surroundings, which can be a very strange experience – our world is so characterised by smells that we hardly think about them when they are there but really notice them when they are absent or replaced by something else. When I travel abroad, one of the first things I usually notice is how the air smells slightly different. No longer smelling pine, fir, and spruce reminds me I am no longer in Sweden, and coming upon those smells abroad, like when I am in Toronto, has become one of my favourite things. The same species of trees grow all over the world, but the scent instantly transports me back to the place where I grew up and the specific character that it had. Scent, in other words, is really important for our perception of the world. It seems, however, to also be somewhat forgettable in its intangibility and subtlety.
In archaeology and history, there are new realisations materialising that scent might be important for understanding and connecting with past societies, too. Researchers are working on an interesting project to recreate common smells from past Europe, in an attempt to provide an entirely new way to experience historical life on the European continent. They are suggesting that smell has been neglected in archaeological and historical research because we associate smell with an animalistic and less noble side of ourselves, but that knowing how the past smelled can be just as valuable as knowing how the past looked.
Though the smells of past Europes are long gone, researchers are able to analyse historical images and texts and excavate remains that give clues about smell – including what ingredients were used in medicine and what ingredients were used in cooking – and work with scientists to recreate them for modern curious (and brave) noses. Museums like the Jorvik Viking Centre in York and the Maurithuis in the Hague have already done exhibitions incorporating smell, with visitors being able to smell things like wood, apples, tar, and fish, transporing them back to the Viking Age, the latter specifically reconstructing the unpleasant smell of an old Amsterdam canal. This new work taking place across the UK and EU could lead to more multisensory museum exhibitions that incorporate visuals, sounds, and smells, allowing visitors to be fully immersed in another time – experiencing time travel that goes beyond traditional item display and accompanying descriptions.
Such exhibitions might be both incredibly cool and mildly unpleasant – and would definitely have people who fantasize about living in the past think again.
We can easily imagine that Europe used to smell very different. Granted, noses wandering about modern London, Amsterdam, and Trondheim are still sometimes assaulted by dog poo, pee, and pollution, but bad smells used to be much more pervasive and pungent. In the early Middle Ages, for example, some used to dump their own faeces and urine right onto the street through the window, apparently not having gotten the memo from the Romans that you could build underground sewage systems for that kind of unfortunate waste product. There was also the terrible smell from tanneries and slaughterhouses, their wastes contaminating waterways and spreading horrible diseases, as well as dung heaps from chickens, cows, horses, and other livestock that also lived in bustling Medieval Northern European cities.
Woodcut depicting a woman emptying what looks like a chamber pot into the street. Image: Wikimedia Commons
These examples were real issues at times in Europe – but they do not mean that people from the time before sewage systems and mainstream soap usage had no standards and could not appreciate finer scents.
Medieval people went so far as to fear foul smells, believing stenches could make you ill, and hence complained to the authorities when the problem got too bad. In Trondheim in Norway, human waste has very rarely been found in archaeological excavation, suggesting that there were designated trash heaps for those kinds of smells.
In addition to the many bad medieval smells that you could find in corners around the city, there were also certainly tons of smells that were characteristic of European society and culture that were much nicer. There would have been herbs used for medicinal purposes, sweet scents from wildflowers growing in nearby meadows, the scent of wood from beautifully fashioned furniture, and the smell of good food at marketplaces. At the Mauritshuis exhibition, visitors could smell clean linen and myrrh in addition to the highly accessible Amsterdam canal as well as the rare and curious scent of ambergris – an odd material coming from the sperm whale which was used in Europe and early Arab civilisations to make perfume and medicine.
In terms of smell – as much an irreplaceable source of information as sight, sound, and touch – medieval Europe was another world, one that was both vibrant and pungent, inviting and repellent, and certainly very different from today. As we have moved on from leather and wood to synthetic materials – such as the blessing and scourge of plastic – and gotten an infinitely better grip on hygiene and sanitation, many of these worse smells have thankfully disappeared from our society. If there had been something like a time machine, it would be interesting to transport someone from the 1300s and ask them what they thought about our world - maybe modern Amsterdam and London would have seemed less odorous for medieval people or simply different, strangely filled with modern chemical pollutants and vehicle emissions. That most people living in Europe today would be stunned by the smells of past European societies, from the outdoors air permeated by smithies, tanneries, and slaughterhouses, to the more intriguing smells found inside private houses and apothecaries and kitchens, would likely be true.
Thinking about the potential to create new bridges between past and present with the unlikely help of smell, researchers really should keep unlocking its secrets. I would love to get the chance to smell lost smells from past Europe, though maybe I will regret that once my nose is permanently damaged by something really terrible – bad smells are really hard to forget – but even so, getting an idea of the bad parts of past societies is important, too. That makes them become more real and, in my opinion, much more fascinating. Thankfully this is possible to do without creating actual dung heaps in museums.