A whiff of history

Exciting as it may seem to put our noses in the past, not all historians believe that we can easily learn deeper truths about the past by resurrecting such scents. Smith, of the University of South Carolina, has argued that while we can produce smells of the past, “what you can’t do is consume them in the same way.”

The Jorvik Viking Center in York, England, is famous for taking visitors right into the smells of Viking life as part of its re-created Viking village. Dale Air, an environmental scenting company, imbued the center’s exhibits with smells that would have been present at the time - right down to the odor of a fish market and a latrine. But to Smith, it doesn’t really help us understand what the past was like. The smell of a Viking latrine may disgust us, but it doesn’t tell us how the Vikings experienced it.

Smith believes that studying smell and other senses is important, but they must be put into context. There are countless examples of how circumstance influences the way we perceive smells; for instance, wintergreen became popular in chewing gum and toothpaste in the United States after World War II, but to the British, the smell would have evoked sickness, since it was used in ointments to treat the wounds of soldiers. If we don’t understand these meanings, we’re just smelling the past as we would now - not as people did at the time.

But this is true of any historical experience: A Renaissance painting means something far different to us than it did to people at the time, yet we still recognize its value. Just as we can place the clothing, settings, and poses of old photographs in historical context, we can also understand the larger meaning of our perfumes, laundry detergents, and ambient odors of civilization and nature. Doing so could enrich the way we experience the past by engaging parts of our brain more directly than vision can.

As a chemical sense, smell has always been a visceral connection to the here and now. For people today, adding smells to our compendium of records and artifacts could stretch that visceral connection in new ways. And looking to the future, it offers us an unusual chance to transmit the legacy of everyday life - whether it’s the smell of a vegetable garden, a day at the beach, or just a whiff of a Starbucks circa 2011.

Courtney Humphries is a freelance writer in Boston and the author of ”Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan…And the World.”