Our knowledge of the past is odourless

January 24, 2020 9:20 AM

In the heritage context, experiencing what the world smelled like in the past enriches our knowledge of it, and, because of the unique relation between odours and memories, allows us to engage with our history in a more emotional way. Smell of Heritage explores the identification, analysis and archival of smells, from determining and describing culturally significant aromas, to the scientific techniques that can help us capture and understand the compounds that make them.

Smell of Heritage is part of Cecilia Bembibre’s PhD project at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage.

Not all historic smells are heritage smells. In order to identify smells worth studying and preserving, we’ve developed a framework that applies heritage guidelines to the recognition of smells with cultural value Once a smell is selected, analytical chemistry techniques are used to extract and analyse the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present in a sample. These are the techniques we are working with...

Smell of Heritage in the press:

The people trying to save scents from extinction, BBC World

In 2003, Unesco adopted a convention to safeguard intangible cultural heritage, which includes social practices, oral traditions and performing arts. Where, though, were the scents? For centuries there have been cultural practices where smell plays a vital role, like the Spanish Fiesta of the patios in Cordova or the Holy Week processions in Popayán, Colombia. In 2018, the skills related to perfumery in Pays de Grasse, France, were included on the intangible heritage list. No scents themselves, however, are listed...

Take London, for example. A deep breath of not-so-fresh air in a typical Central London street might bring you a waft of an Indian curry restaurant, an English pub and traffic exhaust fumes. “The smells and taste in London give you a strong sense of place, a sense of locality, and part of that is that contemporary cities reveal particular paths of migration,” says Rhys-Taylor. “It generally has global roots [and] that has to do with the city’s colonial history.”

But these particular smells, while omnipresent to those living in the city, will not be around forever. “What we increasingly see is the arrival of a transnational aromascape or flavourscape,” says Rhys-Taylor. “It is pretty much the same in every global city now: smell of pulled pork, flat whites, roasting coffee beans is an increasing one, microbreweries. There is a global constellation of transnational aromas and flavours associated with a transnational class, people that move around from city to city.”

This evolution of smells is the motivation for the work of UCL’s Cecilia Bembibre. Cities continuously lose their characteristic odours. Yet, even as scents are disappearing, developing new ones is becoming crucial to their conservation.

Can an Archive Capture the Scents of an Entire Era?, The Atlantic

The smell of an old house on a hot, humid summer day; a whiff of the sea from over a grassy dune; gasoline spilled on pavement at the filling station; a perfume worn by your mother as she leaned over you. Scents are particularly powerful cues for memory, and they can even define a generation: A study found that those born after the 1960s report feeling nostalgic at the smell of Play-Doh.

Still, scents are ephemeral: A shift in climate or building techniques, or a product reformulation, can extinguish the smells of your youth. If you grew up in the country and move to the city, you will no longer smell rain in the fields. And you might be surprised to find when you go back that they have been built over and their scent dispersed.

The Quest to Better Describe the Scent of Old Books, The Smithsonian

You’ve just stepped into a very old library. What’s the sensory experience like? Dust could shimmer in the light; silence fills your ears. But the sense most people notice first is smell—the scent of old books prickling your nose.

Describing that smell, however, is a challenge. And generic adjectives will likely be of little use to future generations of historians trying to document, understand or reproduce the scent of slowly decomposing books. Now, that task may have just gotten easier thanks to a tool called the Historic Book Odor Wheel.

Smell of Heritage is also on twitter at @ucqbbem.

Previously on MF: What do old books smell like?

posted by youarenothere (22 comments total)

Either things used to smell different, or my nose did.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:46 AM on January 24, 2020

(taps forehead) and they mocked me for my JarFart project
posted by elkevelvet at 9:55 AM on January 24, 2020 [4 favorites]

archiving interesting current smells is very different than considering the preservation of smells of the past, mostly because the primary smell of civilizations past was human waste. our knowledge of the past is that poop was absolutely everywhere and it killed people, a lot.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:02 AM on January 24, 2020 [3 favorites]

our knowledge of the past is that poop was absolutely everywhere and it killed people

That might be overstated. It applies much more to urban populations that swelled before sanitation systems could be developed - lots of less dense locations did not endure the constant aroma of poop, and entire societies lived for milennia with adequate control of waste and its smells. Even where outdoor pit toilets were the norm in medium density towns, they were probably not that bad. I can speak personally from some lived experience on summer camp sites and historic sites without modern sanitation (pit toilets instead, with 100-200 people using them) - those toilets don't smell great, though you can mitigate them pretty effectively using lime and sawdust and moving them frequently, but once you're out of their general aroma-shed there is no appreciable impact.

My career in museums and historic sites has brought me a lot of wonderful, functionally-obsolete smells that are now part of my own life nostalgia: the nutty, almost sweet aroma of steam engine lubricant (steam itself just smells like clean hot water); fresh cedar shavings and Douglas fir cuts from boat shops; Stockholm tar; bear grease; boiling bayberries; dried pumpkin "leather," spar varnish; kerosene....It is indeed impossible to imagine the full, rich smellscape of the past, but I enjoy these threads of it.

Fascinating find and post. Thanks!
posted by Miko at 10:12 AM on January 24, 2020 [17 favorites]

About 20 years ago I was a librarian for our local historical society and, one afternoon, got to talking with one of our volunteers, a guy in his 80s, about what important aspects of the past couldn't be captured by the kind of documentation we focused on collecting. The first thing he said, without hesitating, was, "Everything smelled like stale cigarette smoke".
posted by ryanshepard at 10:22 AM on January 24, 2020 [17 favorites]

I do guided tours of our mid-19th century neighborhood during fund-raising weekends and I always make a point of talking to people about how it would have smelled in 1870 or so. This is on the Northside of Pittsburgh so the mills would have been going 24/7 only a few blocks away filling the air with soot, four tracks of coal-fired trains running a block away, horses everywhere, coal stoves burning in each kitchen, outhouses behind each house and most people didn't bath more than once a week. I can't even imagine trying to deal with that stench on a day-to-day basis.
posted by octothorpe at 10:30 AM on January 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is great, thank you. I can recommend Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell for anyone interested in an overview of recent work on the history of smell (the reviewer also notes in passing that "historiography [...] is only now beginning to move beyond the fecal and the fatal in examining urban odours").
posted by inire at 10:36 AM on January 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

Somewhat orthogonal to the larger project but the "transnational aromascape" quote from the BBC article made me consider an olfactory aspect to AirSpace for the first time.
posted by youarenothere at 10:58 AM on January 24, 2020

The first thing he said, without hesitating, was, "Everything smelled like stale cigarette smoke".

I can definitely remember when pretty much every office, restaurant, and recreational space smelled like cigarette smoke. Just recently, I stepped into a random bar in Rhode Island to use the ATM. Smoking has been outlawed there since 2005. The place reeked of stale smoke.

One thing I wish I could smell is something oldsters wax nostalgic about all the time: the smell of people burning leaves in autumn. It was ended for good reason - too much particulate in the air, polluting, aggravating to respiratory conditions - but people seemed to have really loved it and seems like it colored the whole experience of an East Coast autumn back in the day.
posted by Miko at 11:13 AM on January 24, 2020 [9 favorites]

I don't think I could smell cigarette smoke until around 1995 or so. Until then it was so pervasive that I just never sensed it. Now whenever I'm around it, I can't cope with it at all. There's a few bars nearby me that still allow smoking and friends have invited me to go there with them and I just can't. One of my best friends is in a band that I can never see because it only plays in smoking bars and I'll never go.
posted by octothorpe at 11:33 AM on January 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is so thought-provoking, thank you for posting! It really puts the intangible in intangible cultural heritage, in a fascinating and challenging way.
posted by dusty potato at 11:37 AM on January 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

I remember walking around Las Vegas in the mid-2000s and thinking how much everything smelled like raw sewage. Apparently they were the fastest growing city in the country, at the time, and undergoing a development boom, but they had built more houses than available sewage capacity could support. That pervasive smell of human and animal waste is what I imagine the cities of the past mostly smelled like, if you weren't lucky enough to live in a neighborhood upwind of the morass.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:27 PM on January 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

- This thing: “It is pretty much the same in every global city now: smell of pulled pork, flat whites, roasting coffee beans is an increasing one, microbreweries. There is a global constellation of transnational aromas and flavours associated with a transnational class, people that move around from city to city.” Not in my experience? I mean, if you gravitate to gentrifying or full-blown hipster neighborhoods, then yeah, you'll probably wander past a microbrewery or coffee roaster. That leaves out a lot of places, though.

- Ditto on the cigarette thing. The last time I was in a place that allowed inside smoking, I could smell it on my clothes for days, and finally broke down and did a load of laundry off-schedule to get rid of it. The last time I actually smoked a cigar, I could taste it the day after, all day, and brushing my teeth wouldn't get rid of it. Back in the day, even if you didn't smoke yourself, you usually had an ashtray for guests, and asking someone to go outside to smoke was tantamount to making them take a piss in your backyard.

- The smell of industry is one thing that Stephen King used to evoke the passage of time in 11/22/63; one of the first things that the protagonist notices when he goes back to the late fifties is that the local mill (in Maine, of course) is still in operation, and it reeks.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:41 PM on January 24, 2020 [3 favorites]

Oh, yeah. A few things: my family in Texas lived near a number of refineries. The refineries had a whole panoply of strange aromas, some of them acrid and metallic, some faintly sweetish. That area now is a major US cancer corridor. Then, in rural East Texas, the scent of paper mills was everpresent. It's a sickly smell, also sweetish but in a cloying way. Where I live now, there's a whole part of my county near a Nescafe plant. The coffee smell is very strong and there's a certain amount of local fondness for it.
posted by Miko at 1:56 PM on January 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

I remember waiting for my train on a suburban station in Sydney a few years ago when a steam train was due to come past, one of the once-a-year public holiday services Transport Heritage run. The platform was crowded with adult trainspotters and cameras, and even more parents with small children. Here it comes! You could hear the chuffing and the smoke puffing into the sky down the line.
It was exactly as loud as steam trains always are and the driver blew the whistle for the children, great! They were waving and cheering. Then when it passed the locomotive sprayed everyone near the platform edge with steam and smuts, and the coal smoke was pulled into the low pressure behind the train. We all started coughing and spluttering from the stench of coal smoke and everyone got big and small chunks of coal and cinders all over them. There were children crying everywhere, old people coughing. It was disgusting, coal smoke is horrible.
Imagine when that was every train.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:12 PM on January 24, 2020 [6 favorites]

The smell of a coal fire is the smell of my grandparents' house in Warrington. The times that I've smelt it since are very rare, and I expect that it will disappear completely. But it would have been absolutely pervasive for 100 years or more in any British town or city.
posted by plonkee at 3:27 PM on January 24, 2020 [3 favorites]

For what it’s worth I had a brief discussion in a course I used to teach about the smell of a nineteenth century urban city. Like Miko says the smell of human waste would have been there but dealing with human waste is a high priority, in all cities there were infrastructures to centralise and get rid of it. Animal waste though would have been everywhere, and gotten worse and more pervasive as rail networks let cities bring more fodder to market—the heyday of urban horse burden was _after_ railways. Some cities had council workers whose job it was to shovel it all. The smell of a nineteenth century city was animal waste, but also the burden animals themselves: horses, mules, donkeys, bullocks, dogs.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:45 PM on January 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

The smell of a nineteenth century city was animal waste, but also the burden animals themselves: horses, mules, donkeys, bullocks, dogs.

Over the course of the 19th c., Washington, D.C. had four different places that locals called "horse heavens", where dead and dying work horses were dumped. It was a major sanitation issue here for decades.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:59 AM on January 25, 2020

Driving diagonally across Virginia, we would cross the James river at Hopewell. Like passing through a patchwork quilt of putrid, rancid, sulfurous, throat-burning, eye-blinding, chemical smells.

Then to Williamsburg. The smell of cloves in the apothecary. Gingerbread baking. Fresh oak shavings at the cooper. Vegetable tanned leather at the harness maker. Coal fires and hot iron at the blacksmith. Fresh horse manure in the street. Boxwood. Lavender. Potpourri.

Hell to heaven.
posted by ohshenandoah at 11:31 AM on January 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

The smell that defines a global city for me Is Subway Restaurants. Pervasive in a 100 metre radius.
posted by MT at 12:04 PM on January 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

Driving diagonally across Virginia, we would cross the James river at Hopewell. Like passing through a patchwork quilt of putrid, rancid, sulfurous, throat-burning, eye-blinding, chemical smells.

The Raritan River in New Jersey was like that in the 70s. I remember holding my breath as we drove over it on drives to pick up my sister from Rutgers.
posted by octothorpe at 3:02 PM on January 25, 2020

There's a memorable bit in Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries in which he describes how the raw sewage that used to get pumped into the Harlem River in NYC would clump into floating rafts of shit, and he and his friends would climb up to a rocky overlook and dive into the river, the object to avoid hitting shit. Their immune systems must have been incredible.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:26 PM on January 26, 2020 [1 favorite]