George Washington Stank Here

To truly understand history, use your nose.

- Jessica Wapner

SOME PEOPLE are distressed that while we can read history, we cannot smell it. “Our knowledge of the past is odorless,” Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlic write in a new study on historic odors. Bembibre and Strlic, preservation scientists at University College London, want to change that.

We can look at photographs and drawings, read memoirs and listen to old recordings, but we can’t conjure the odors of past events. We don’t know what the air smelled like to Marco Polo as he traveled the Silk Road, or to the first northern Indians who gathered around Siddhartha Gautama in the fifth century B.C., or to the soldiers of the American Revolution who woke up at Fort McHenry to find that their flag was still there.

Many attempts have been made to tear down the wall separating our noses from our past. At the Jorvik Viking museum in York, England, the scent of medieval seafarers emanates from the timber and other artifacts found at the archaeological site on which the gallery was built. Urban planner Victoria Henshaw pioneered the creation of “urban smellscapes,” city maps that distinguish neighborhoods by fragrance. In 2008, curator Robert Blackson, then at the Reg Vardy Gallery, in Sunderland, England, installed a scent-only exhibit with artistic representations of the smell of communism, Cleopatra’s hair, extinct flowers, the sun and other out-of-reach odors. Instead of the usual gift shop gallery guide, visitors could purchase a scratch-and-sniff-book, called If There Ever Was, to remember the exhibit. At the National Museum of Australia, an exhibit on the cooking tools of trepang fishermen was accompanied by a station at which visitors could smell dried sea cucumber. “Smells hold information about who we are and the way we live,” say Bembibre and Strlic. “They are part of our olfactory heritage.”