Archaeology of the Senses

Throughout this workshop, you will learn about the smells that defined the mummification chambers and tombs, and the scents that the ancient Egyptians themselves wished to be surrounded by in their life after death. In the first hour, Dora will teach you about the olfactory motivation for mummification and the substances employed during the process. In the second hour, she will give you a detailed insight into the materials. You will be able to smell each ingredient and you will learn about their significance for the Egyptians and the reasons behind their use. In the third and last hour, you will recreate the essence of mummification in a bottle by using the very same ingredients the ancient Egyptians employed for embalming their dead. Don’t worry, you will end up with an exceedingly pleasant smell.

Time and Date: September 28, 2019, 11am-2pm
Price: 90€ | Students / Artists / Stadspas: 63€
Location: Mediamatic, Dijksgracht 6, Amsterdam
Tickets available on https://www.mediamatic.net/en/page/374727/recreate-the-essence-of-mummification

Throughout this workshop, you will learn about the smells that defined the mummification chambers and tombs, and the scents that the ancient Egyptians themselves wished to be surrounded by in their life after death. The event is run by Egyptologist Dora Goldsmith and olfactory artist Klara Ravat.

The workshop will take three hours and is made up of three components. In the first hour, Dora will teach you about the olfactory motivation for mummification and the substances employed during the process. You will be able to smell each ingredient and you will learn about their significance for the Egyptians and the reasons behind their use. In the second hour, Klara will give you an insight to the materials by teaching you about their composition and their use in modern perfumery. In the third and last hour, you will recreate the essence of mummification in a bottle by using the very same ingredients the ancient Egyptians employed for embalming their dead! Don’t worry, you will end up with an exceedingly pleasant smell!

Visit the Smell Lab in Berlin to learn about mummification and to experience a part of ancient Egypt coming back to life through your nose!

Price: 65€ + ticket fee
Time and Date: March 23, 2019, 5pm-8pm
Location: Smell Lab, Berlin
Tickets are available on: https://www.smell-lab.org/egyptianafterlife
For questions, please e-mail: hello@smell-lab.org

http://ibisz.iif.hu/ozirisz/2021/09/16/program-en/

The ancient Egyptian written record contains a large number of references to the scent of plants. Orchards and vegetable gardens were filled with fragrant trees, flowers and herbs to satisfy the gods with their aroma and to contribute to the pleasant olfactory landscape of the city. The scent of all manner of flowers, fruits, vegetables and fresh herbs was offered to the gods, kings and high officials as a gift under the expression 'garden fragrance' (sTi SA). It is the scent that was being offered as an object in its own right, not the substances emitting the odors. The strong aroma of blossoming vegetation after the inundation of the Nile was often described in synesthetic compositions. Olfaction was coupled with vision in literary works to create a synesthetic literary metaphor to describe how the scents of fresh plants 'shine' (THn) in the field or the temple when presented as an offering. The importance of the scent of plants is reflected in everyday life in personal names, such as 'Green Scent' (sTi wAD), or the fact that the only non-royal who was described as having a pleasant smell was the gardener. The fragrance of fresh plants also played an essential role in funerary practices in the form of mummy garlands covering mummies from head to toe. The ancient Egyptians associated the scent of fresh flowers, herbs and fruits with the force of nature that has life-giving qualities through its rebirth every year after the inundation of the Nile. Through their strong fragrance and vibrant colors, fresh plants were believed to assist the rejuvenation of the deceased. Flower bouquets were also called anx in Egyptian, which means 'life'.

Lecture title: The Smell of Gardens in Ancient Egypt
Date: December 4, 2019
Lecture series by Dora Goldsmith: The Scent of Ancient Egypt, November 20 - December 11, 2019
Location: Haus Bastian, Center for Cultural Education, Egyptian Museum Berlin

An olfactory artist (Klara Ravat) and an Egyptologist (Dora Goldsmith) came together to create a workshop, where you can make your own perfume based on an ancient Egyptian recipe that dates back to as early as the building of the pyramids. Throughout this workshop, we will follow an ancient Egyptian recipe step-by-step to create a solid perfume. You will receive a copy of the original hieroglyphic text with a translation and explanations, as well as all the required materials. Dora will guide you through the text and present an overview of the history of the recipe. Klara will introduce you to perfume-making and give you an insight into the materials. Beside the traditional, solid perfume, we will also make a modern, liquid version of the fragrance. The workshop will take three hours. At the end of the event, you will go home with two bottles. One of them will contain a solid perfume based on an ancient Egyptian recipe, the other its modern-day, liquid equivalent. Join us to create a piece of fragrant history that you can take home with you! Price: 60€ + ticket fee. Time and Date: July 15, 2018, 3pm-6pm. Location: Lacuna Lab, Berlin-Kreuzberg. https://www.smell-lab.org/ancientegyptian

The scent kit includes six of my scent reconstructions, which are all based on my PhD research on the sense of smell in ancient Egypt. It also includes a detailed description of the significance of each scent for the ancient Egyptian culture.
(1)  Mendesian
(2)  Mummification
(3)  Kyphi
(4)  Ancient Egyptian garden fragrance
(5)  Flowers at the pond
(6)  Scent of ancient Egyptian festivals
Price: 120€ + shipping

All knowledge of the world is shaped by the way our senses perceive it. In archaeology, and especially in Egyptological studies, a visual approach has predominated the analysis of ancient material remains. When viewed from a sensorybased framework, however, a new, dynamic dimensionality of the material record might be revealed. This approach to the study of the past promises to open both innovative and rewarding avenues for exploration. Such work fosters an environment for interdisciplinary study involving researchers in such diverse fields as  neuroscience, psychology, ethnography, and the digital humanities. This paper aims to explore the applications of sensory analysis to Egyptology by focusing on New Kingdom tomb depictions of banquets and relevant mortuary texts to champion this paradigm as one that has potential to truly humanize the past.

The mummy kit contains the following:
(1) Six scent reconstructions representing the olfactory landscape of mummification based on my PhD research on the fragrant materials involved in the process of mummification
(2) Two phials to illustrate the substances used to prepare the dead for their next life
(3) An 8-page-long article about the smell of mummification and ancient Egyptian afterlife
Price: 130€ + shipping

The hieroglyphic script teaches us that fish was the prototype of stench in ancient Egypt, as every word related to unpleasant smell was classified with a fish classifier. Multiple written sources inform us explicitly that fish, birds and their natural environment in Egypt, the swamps of the Delta, stank. The Nile Delta is found in the north of Egypt and it is where the Egyptians went fishing and fowling. Fish and birds in their evil-smelling environment symbolized several concepts at the same time: stench, chaos, evil, the enemy and being far away from home. It was the king’s duty to annihilate bad smells by going fishing and fowling in the dangerous, foul-smelling swamps and to secure a sweet-smelling urban environment, where the scent of perfumes and flowers filled the air. In the royal battle against evil, fish and fowl symbolized the stench, danger and the enemy that the king had to defeat. Unpleasant smells were closely related to the archenemy of the king, the god Seth. Seth, the god of all evil, incorporated all these aspects in his figure: fish and fowl, the enemy, and foul smells. Nevertheless, his evil and unpleasant nature was a necessary part of existence. There was no good without evil. There was no perfume without stench.

The throne room of the North West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud has been the subject of several studies, mainly focused on its decorative program. Scholars have long acknowledged that this space was used, especially in a political sense, to separate the more public area from the more private, or ceremonial, wing of the palace: a sort of reception suite. Despite many insightful ideas on some particular aspects, there appear to be few works or even no specific studies on this room as a whole, with special regard to the audience. This paper fills part of this gap by reconsidering the throne room as transitional or borderline context – both for Assyrians and guests – and as a sensory space that is both manipulative and synesthetic. In this way the room is evaluated holistically: the images and the so-called „Standard Inscription“ are seen to cooperate with the immaterial aspects, such as 1) the management of the entrances and the space – judged on the basis of a ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’ rule; 2) the manipulation of fields of view, interplay of light and shadow; 3) the emotional responses to the auditory, visual and olfactory stimuli which allowed the audience to fully experience the space, even activating what is commonly referred to as ‘non-sense’ or ‘sixth sense’. Following the methodologies used in the recent archaeology of the senses, I argue that the throne room of Ashurnasirpal II was a melting pot of sensorial stimuli, intended to cause the phenomenon of the arousal for a psychological control of the minds.

Lecture title: The Olfactory Landscape of Lovemaking and Sexuality in Ancient Egypt
Date: December 11, 2019
Lecture series by Dora Goldsmith: The Scent of Ancient Egypt, November 20 - December 11, 2019
Location: Haus Bastian, Center for Cultural Education, Egyptian Museum Berlin

Lecture title: The Smell of Temples in Ancient Egypt
Date: November 27, 2019
Lecture series by Dora Goldsmith: The Scent of Ancient Egypt, November 20 - December 11, 2019
Location: Haus Bastian, Center for Cultural Education, Egyptian Museum Berlin

The ancient Egyptians noticed very early in their dynastic history that the body, both of humans and animals, rots and stinks after death. The written documents teach us that it was the unbearable stench of the putrefying corpse that motivated the Egyptians to mummify their dead. Embalming stopped the internal organs from rotting and prevented undesired body fluids from leaving the body, and as a result, the corpse no longer emitted an evil smell. No ancient Egyptian handbook has survived that details the process of mummification step-by-step with all the fragrant substances involved in it. Embalming was regarded as a craft, inherited from father to son, which was mastered through the method of ‘learning by doing’. Our overall knowledge of the fragrant matter employed in embalming arrives from a combination of the written and archaeological evidence. The process of mummification executed with the highest care can be divided into four main stages – operative, desiccation, waterproofing and wrapping stage – in each of which scents played an essential role. After the body was successfully mummified, the stench of the decaying cadaver turned into a pleasant scent. One of the aspirations of commoners in life after death was to have a divine fragrance, in which only the king could partake in the world of the living. It was possible only in the ideal world of the hereafter for an ordinary Egyptian to reach the highest level of olfactory hierarchy. After the deceased has passed the Weighing of the Heart, gained admittance to the netherworld and reached the imAx-state, their smell was designated as sTi nTr ‘divine scent’.

The Colorado Plateau of the southwest United States is known for dramatic topography and
vibrant indigenous communities. Here, phenomenologists and GIS researchers are investigating
ancient Pueblo senses of place, visibility, and the acoustic properties of monumental spaces.
Southwest archaeologists have amassed large bodies of data on ceremonialism, foodways, and
musical instruments. Although sensory applications seldom have been explicit in this work, the
data have much potential. Because sensory studies are relatively new in archaeology, we need
to develop legislation to help land management agencies avoid potentially damaging effects to
viewsheds and soundscapes from destructive activities such as oil and gas exploration.

Review of La Nasa, J., Degano, I., Modugno, F., Guerrini, C., Facchetti, F., Turina, V., Carretta, A., Greco, C., Ferraris, E., Colombini, M.P. and Ribechini, E. (2022), Archaeology of the Invisible: The Scent of Kha and Merit, Journal of Archaeological Science 141, pp. 1-14.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440322000358

Representations of banquet in the art of third millennium BC are largely present on sculpted plaques and cylinder seals, mainly. Banquet motif is made upon a kind a iconographic canon: next to the moment of feasting, that is the consumption of food and drink, the representations also encompass other moments, such as the music due to the presence musicians playing lyres and harps and singers. The present paper focuses on the sensorial analysis of the banquet scenes: smell, taste and hearing, beyond sight, have a fundamental role in the construction of social ties that is in fact at the centre of the function and meaning of feasting in ancient Sumerian society.

The aim of this paper is to explain the historical and technical construction of the Christian sense of the bells’ sound through the analysis of historical and archaeological sources (6th-9th c.). In the first part, the question of the origin of bells is analyzed with particular attention to the role of sound. In the second part, the techniques of production and their relationship with the sound are considered. The inter-sensorial rituals carried out during the bell casting (exorcism and blessing) and before the setting of the bells (baptism) are cited to demonstrate that the bells are seen as a path towards God and as the voice of God. Carolingian and Romanesque theoretical speculations on the liturgical value of the bell are best understood by knowing the scenario of the making of a bell and the technical know-how to produce it.

Master Thesis: The Managemet of Material Antiquity in Modern Greek Poetry of 19th Century: A. R. Rangavis, S. N. Vasiliades, C. Palamas, University of Ioannina, Department of Philology, 2016
Η διαχείριση της υλικής αρχαιότητας στη νεοελληνική ποίηση του 19ου αιώνα: Α. Ρ. Ραγκαβής, Σ. Ν. Βασιλειάδης, Κ. Παλαμάς, Πανεπιστήμιο Ιωαννίνων, Τμήμα Φιλολογίας, 2016

The “Chaco Phenomenon” has been a major research focus within Ancestral Puebloan archaeology, yet while most scholars agree that some kind of shared ideology and ritual permitted the creation of this distinctive network of pueblo villages throughout a vast region of the American Southwest, few have attempted to explain the specifics of Chacoan ritual practice. This paper uses a phenomenological approach to examine exotic imports in Chaco Canyon including turquoise, shell, cacao, copper bells, and macaws and argues for the importance of these objects’ unique sensory characteristics in crafting Chaco’s compelling ritual environment. By skillfully employing striking new colors, sounds, and tastes in both “concealed” and “conspicuous” practices of ritual deposition and public performances, Chacoan religious personnel would have not only have demonstrated their spiritual prestige by having acquired such items, but also allowed ritual participants to hear, see, and taste a paradisiacal realm akin to the shared Mesoamerican-Southwestern Flower World. Ultimately, this paper argues that sensory-based archaeological approaches can greatly enrich investigations of ritual practice, cosmology, and human experience at Chaco Canyon.

Tiesler, Vera, Kadwin Pérez y Patricia Quintana
2018 Painting the Dead in the Northern Maya Lowlands En Painting the Skin. Pigments on Bodies and Codices in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, editado por Elodie Dupey y María Vázquez de Agredos, pp. 43-55. Arizona University Press, Tucson.

The recent increase of sensory archaeology investigations has broadened the theory and field practices employed when examining ancient site experience. Sound and acoustics have played a recurring theme in many studies, from retracing past acoustic designs to investigating the impacts of an ancient everyday soundscape. The development of sense‐based archaeological explorations in the early 21st century coincided with similar phenomenologically related inquiries across the built environment fields, from contemporary architectural theory and city planning to intangible and values‐based heritage practices. In this discussion, an initial overview of the current discourse of sensory archaeology, archaeoacoustics, and ancient sound studies highlights discursive and applied overlaps from architectural and soundscape theory. The review focuses in particular on the field of psychoacoustics and recent advances in predicting the human response to differing sonic conditions. It also sets the multidisciplinary stage for current fieldwork at the Hellenic sanctuary of Zeus on Mount Lykaion, Greece. Few written accounts of this site remain from antiquity, and the architectural remnants are limited and fragmented; thus the rituals and athletic competition practices of antiquity remain largely unknown. One must look to other informative sources to gain insights into the past. Sonic relationships observed at the site enable startling communicative ability between certain distant locations, often linking landscape features and building footprints. Could such synchronicities point to possible acoustic awareness in the ancient siting of structures? It remains a logical possibility considering the public and performative nature of Zeus’ cult practices at other contemporaneous sites. Binaural recording technology, psychoacoustic analyses, and site‐mapping techniques are presented as tools for detecting whether and where such determinative patterns exist between the site and surrounding mountainous terrain. The methodologies that bridge these technologies with theoretical approaches from multiple disciplines will be described in detail along with the first findings and their possible significance.

The concept of privacy looms large in studies of ancient Greek houses. The house is often conceptualized as a self-contained, cloistered unit within the larger city, a microcosm of the city-state unto itself, cut off as much as possible from a competitive and potentially threatening outside world. Indeed, the preoccupation with Greek domestic privacy in modern scholarship has been strongly influenced by ancient texts which describe a separation between the public and private worlds and express outrage at the violation of the domestic sphere by outsiders. Without denying the importance of the internal world of the home, I would like to challenge the idea of total household privacy, and even its desirability, through an examination of some of the activities of daily life in the Classical (480–323 BC) and Hellenistic (323–31 BC) periods. In particular, I will consider how domestic craft production and agricultural processing—activities in which many Greek households engaged—impacted domestic privacy.

The sights, sounds, and smells of domestic production were part of the experience of everyday life in ancient Greek cities. Thus, when examining the practicalities of domestic production, moving beyond sight to a consideration of other senses causes the inner world of the home to appear less private. While householders could easily restrict the visibility of domestic activities to the outside world, other sensory signals were more difficult to control. Though some economic activities in ancient Greek cities took place in an alternate ‘invisible’ economy outside of the control of the state (Cohen 1992), I argue that even if domestic production was taking place unseen within private Greek houses, it was never truly ‘invisible’ in a social sense, because other sensory signals extended the performance of production into the street where it could still be ‘observed’ by neighbours and passers-by. Some crafts were more visually, olfactorily or acoustically intrusive than others, so my focus here is on craft activities that were particularly messy, noisy or smelly.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/715345

The publication of my research on the Mendesian perfume with Robert J. Littman (University of Hawai’i at Manoa), Jay Silverstein (University of Tyumen) and Sean Coughlin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) in Near Eastern Archaeology

"The gendered body takes a phenomenological turn in Brower’s cosmopolitan essay on oral sexuality within philosophical, feminist, and lesbian traditions..."
  ("Editorial" by Michelle Iwen)

Abstract:
The 'traditional philosophical prestige' of seeing and touching, as analyzed by Emmanuel Levinas, comes to dominate the qualities of the other three senses. An investigation of the roles of these prestigious senses, along with the resultant privileged sense-organs of the hand and the eye, within phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and gender- or queer-theory suggests that the part of the prestige of touch will have been related to its function in the phenomenality of feeling. Yet the sense of taste seems to be as applicable, if not more so, to the phenomenal experience of selfhood based on feeling as theorized by Edmund Husserl and Jean-Luc Marion. The tongue, rather than the hand, is reconsidered as a sense-organ of touch in order to salvage the all but lost tang of the tangible. As such, the tongue and taste not only illuminate the shortcomings of binary gender theories based on either inner feeling or outer surface anatomy (or, either interior orifices or exterior appendages), but further discover a remarkable phenomenology of the body to be found in the writings of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig that moves beyond certain masculine tendencies lurking about the hand and observation (as described by Freud and Butler). The phenomenal experience of the other that yields either empathy (for Husserl), love/eros (for Marion), or hearing and heeding 'Thou shall not kill' (for Levinas) has much to learn from the orality of women's writing. The third body, as written by Cixous, can experience the self as selftaste (as considered by Derrida) and experiences the other as the taste of the other. It is, thereby, opened to a love or a justice (or an erotic justice) beyond the proclamation of Levinas that 'ethics is an optics' as well as any ethics as a mere haptics to be found in Husserl or Marion, where feeling seems always determined by the hand.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-the-Senses-in-the-Ancient-Near/Neumann-Thomason/p/book/9780367235284
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429280207-36/smellscapes-ancient-egypt-dora-goldsmith

The olfactory world of a city reveals many aspects of a culture: urban planning, social hierarchy, professional and culinary activities, customs and values, sexual behavior, hygiene, treatment of the sick, religious beliefs, differences between mundane and holy days, plant cultivation, and animal husbandry. One way to discover the smellscapes of an ancient Egyptian city is by examining the written sources that elaborate on the smells of various urban areas. Since odors are left mostly undetected in the archaeological record, the texts the ancient Egyptians recorded themselves about the smell of their urban environment are all the more important. Within the human-made, ancient Egyptian urban environment, each area and establishment had its own special smell defined by the time of year and the activities that took place within them. The written sources elaborate on the sweet scent of the streets imbued with incense and myrrh during festivals, the perfume of the queen that fills the halls of the palace, the smell of ritual offerings getting mixed in the cult chamber of the temple, and the aroma of incense burnt in simple houses. Nevertheless, the texts don’t fail to describe the stench of industrial areas, drunkards whirling around in pleasure in the streets and the unpleasant smell of the sick.

Resumen:
Tras 60 años de la publicación de las excavaciones en la Cueva de la Torre del Mal Paso (Castellnovo, Castelló), reestudiamos sus materiales y analizamos el uso que tuvo esta cavidad durante época ibérica. Mal Paso fue un espacio cultual dónde la imagen ofrendada jugó un papel vital en el desarrollo de las prácticas rituales. Teniendo en cuenta otros espacios similares, esta cueva destaca no solo por su cronología de uso, sino también por su localización y materialidad. Su frecuentación centrada entre los siglos III-I aC y su situación a pocos metros de un poblado, contrastan con otro ejemplos de sacralización rupestre analizados. Sin embargo, una variable se mantiene en relación a las cuevas rituales de siglos anteriores: la reutilización de un espacio sacro.
Palabras clave: Cueva, ritual, tránsito, cultura ibérica, espacio sensorial.


Abstract:
Sixty years after the excavations in Cueva de la Torre del Mal Paso (Castellnovo, Castelló) were published, we have restudied its materials and analyzed the use that this cave had during the Iberian Iron Age. Mal Paso was a sacred space where the offered images had a really important role in the ritual practices. By considering other similar spaces, this cave stands out not only because of its chronology, but also because of its location and materiality. Its chronology, focused between the 3rd and the 1st centuries BC, and its location, a few meters from a settlement, contrast with other examples of rock sacralization from the same area. However, looking at the caves ritualized between the 5th and the 4th centuries BC, one variable stays clear: the reutilization of a sacred space.
Keywords: Cave, ritual, transition, Iberian Culture, sensorial space.

“Path-breaking. This work is full of useful knowledge, and it is very interesting.”
—David B. Small, Lehigh University

“This innovative and engaging collection explores the global experiences and diverse creations of landscapes of the night in the ancient world. Covering topics ranging from nightscapes to nocturnal processions, the authors document the diverse strategies and technologies used to resist and adapt to darkness from fire beacons in Mesopotamia to the flickering oil lamps at the Sanctuary of Samothrace. The scope is global: Ur to Chaco Canyon, Deir el-Medina to Tiwanaku, Cahokia to Conchapata, and beyond.The archaeological implications are widely significant. The essays are always enlightening in this stimulating, illuminating volume.”
—Jerry D. Moore, California State University, Dominguez Hills, author of Incidence of Travel

After Dark explores the experience of nighttime within ancient urban settings. Contributors present material evidence related to how ancient people manipulated and confronted darkness and night in urban landscapes, advancing our knowledge of the archaeology of cities, the archaeology of darkness and night, and lychnology (the study of ancient lighting devices).

Sensory archaeology focuses on the sensual experience of the nocturnal environment—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feel of an ancient city—and the multi-faceted stimuli that diverse urban populations experienced in the dark. Contributors investigate night work—for example, standing guard or pursuing nocturnal trades—and nightlife, such as gambling at Chaco Canyon. They also examine how urban architecture, infrastructure, and the corresponding lighting were inextricably involved in enabling nighttime pursuits and signaling social status.

The subjects of the night, darkness, and illumination taken together form a comprehensive framework for analyzing city life. After Dark embraces night as a conceptual lens through which to view the material and visual cultures of the ancient world and, in doing so, demonstrates a wealth of activities, behaviors, and beliefs that took place between dusk and dawn. This perspective greatly enriches the understanding of urban life and its evolution and has much to offer archaeologists in deepening an examination of complexity and inequality. This volume will be of interest to any scholar or student of the past who is interested in urban activities and the significance of the night in urban settings.

Contributors: Susan M. Alt, J. Antonio Ochatoma Cabrera, Martha Cabrera Romero, Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, Kirby Farrah, Nancy Gonlin, Anna Guengerich, Christopher Hernandez, John Janusek, Kristin V. Landau, Maggie L. Popkin, Monica L. Smith, Meghan E. Strong, Susan Toby Evans, Robert S. Weiner

NANCY GONLIN
Nancy Gonlin is a Mesoamerican archaeologist who specializes in daily and nightly practices, household studies, and inequality. She is editor-in-chief of Ancient Mesoamerica, and her publications include the coedited volumes Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica, Ancient Households of the Americas, Human Adaptation in Ancient Mesoamerica, and Archaeology of the Night. She is coauthor of Copán: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Maya Kingdom and The Archaeology of Native North America, 2nd ed. Gonlin is a professor of anthropology at Bellevue College in Washington.

MEGHAN E. STRONG
Meghan E. Strong is adjunct assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University and research associate at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. An archaeologist and art historian, she specializes in sensory archaeology, performance, and perception within the cultures of ancient Egypt and the Near East. She is the author of Sacred Flames: The Power of Artificial Light in Ancient Egypt.

The hieroglyphic script teaches us that fish was the prototype of stench in ancient Egypt, as every word related to unpleasant smell was classified with a fish classifier. Multiple written sources inform us explicitly that fish, birds and their natural environment in Egypt, the swamps of the Delta, stank. The Nile Delta is found in the north of Egypt and it is where the Egyptians went fishing and fowling. Fish and birds in their evil-smelling environment symbolized several concepts at the same time: stench, chaos, evil, the enemy and being far away from home. It was the king's duty to annihilate bad smells by going fishing and fowling in the dangerous, foul-smelling swamps and to secure a sweet-smelling urban environment, where the scent of perfumes and flowers filled the air. In the royal battle against evil, fish and fowl symbolized the stench, danger and the enemy that the king had to defeat. Unpleasant smells were closely related to the archenemy of the king, the god Seth. Seth, the god of all evil, incorporated all these aspects in his figure: fish and fowl, the enemy, and foul smells. Nevertheless, his evil and unpleasant nature was a necessary part of existence. There was no good without evil. There was no perfume without stench.

Nuestros sentidos son el medio que posibilita la interacción con el mundo que nos rodea y, como tales, actúan como un elemento clave en la creación y percepción de nuestras construcciones sociales e identitarias. Entre las comunidades de la Primera Edad del Hierro, la potenciación de los factores olfativos mediante el uso de perfumes o la cremación de inciensos, contribuyó a potenciar sensorialmente la excepcionalidad de ciertas celebraciones y liturgias colectivas.  Además, en este caso, el efecto de los aromas peculiares y particulares de las preparaciones alimentarias y de las bebidas consumidas, contribuiría también de forma muy importante a generar los olores del festín

26th EAA Virtual Annual Meeting, 24-30 August 2020

Although caves are dynamic landforms that have changed over time, both physically and culturally, their characteristically sheltered interiors can be assumed to have retained aspects of their past sensoriums across prehistory and history. With the aim of achieving a better understanding of human uses and experiences of caves, we therefore consider the sensorium as an essential component. We also believe that to record and analyse their sensory dimensions in a scientific manner will complement established forms of cave archaeology data, at the same time as contributing to the broader goal of developing a methodologically more rigorous sensory archaeology.

In this framework, we are gathering and comparing sensory archaeological data for a sample of caves from diverse prehistoric cultures, periods and regions across the Northern Mediterranean. The three currently selected caves are: Mala (Nova) Pećina in Croatia, with Early Neolithic and Early Bronze Age occupation deposits; Grotta Pila in west-central Italy, with Epigravettian occupation evidence as well as Early Bronze Age mortuary deposits; and Cueva Merinel in Spain, which developed as a key itinerary for ritual pilgrims drawn from diverse settlements during Iron Age.

In this presentation, we detail how we are recording and analysing the environments of these caves focusing on the ways that people interacted with them in prehistory. In particular, we have begun to record their sensorially stimulating micro-climatic features, such as temperature, humidity, luminance, airflows, kinaesthetic and sounds, as well as mapping their archaeology remains. Based on previous work by Trimmis, we are employing a ‘Paperless Mapping Methodology’ for the cave survey and sensorial data georeferencing. Ultimately, we will correlate, in a computational environment, the archaeological data with the sensorial data, in order to define and compare the sensorial impact of embodied visits, occupations and performances in these spaces in different cultural, temporal and landscape contexts.

CAVES AS RITUAL SPACES IN THE IBERIAN PERIOD. THE CASES OF KELIN, EDETA AND ARSE

This book offers a sample of the existing diversity of ritualistic spaces traditionally classified as Iberian sanctuary- aves (6th-1st centuries BCE). Stemming from some specific cases, different variables which allow us to identify a diversity of material and territorial patterns are examined, as well as other distinctive physical and sensory features.

LAS CUEVAS COMO ESPACIOS RITUALES EN ÉPOCA IBÉRICA. LOS CASOS DE KELIN, EDETA Y ARSE

Este libro es una muestra de la diversidad existente dentro del conjunto de espacios rituales categorizados tradicionalmente como cuevas-santuario ibéricas (ss. VI-I a.C.). Partiendo de casos específicos, se analizan diversas variables que permiten identificar distintas pautas materiales y territoriales, así como otras particularidades físicas y sensoriales.

The way a Roman theatre is presently known, interpreted, sensed or reimaged is entrusted, above all, to our faculty of sight. And yet the Roman theatre was not simply a building to be seen. It was also a place full of sounds and a place in which various smells mixed together in a way that affected the performance. In the theatre, visual perception was thus activated alongside the auditory and olfactory perception of the environment. Is there today any possibility of experiencing a reenactment of the smells that spread everywhere within Roman theatres so that we can better understand this distinctive feature of these buildings during the Imperial age? What new technical means can be mobilized to enable modern audiences to smell and sense theatrical antiquity (for instance, in museums and multi-media productions)? With reference to the concrete proposal of the olfactory installation – the so called ‘olfactory plate’ – in the Multimedia and Sensory Museum of Milan Roman Theatre, and through a discussion of the reenactment and the re-interpretation of smells in performances of Latin dramatic texts, this chapter reflects on the contemporary reception of smells and other sensory perceptions by visitors to the archaeological remains of Roman theatres, as well as by audiences and performers in these spaces.