“There are also ‘nose witnesses’ alive today who can help us recreate smells”
Using algorithms and visual and written evidence, scientists from the United Kingdom and the European Union are recreating the smells of the past.
Chemists and historians in a research group called Odeuropa spent more than two years isolating and reproducing smells associated with key moments and places in history.
The research team argued that academic attempts to understand the past have unfairly ignored smells.
“A hierarchy of the senses has persisted in science and historical study,” said Cecilia Bembibre, a lecturer in sustainable heritage at University College London:
“There was an idea that smell was not a noble human sense and was somehow less objective and reliable.
The project, funded by a €2.8 million grant from the EU’s Horizon program in 2020, collected visual and written evidence to reconstruct the essential smells produced by the trade, habits and diets of the past.
Bembibre, the Odeuropa project researcher, illustrated these efforts:
In Germany, they are analyzing thousands of historical images related to scent. In Italy, they are focusing on textual analysis, from ancient medical formulas to cooking manuals.
In the study, AI algorithms were taught to recognize images related to smells, such as a drawing of people holding their noses.
By training artificial intelligence with a series of similar images, researchers eventually developed an algorithm that recognizes behaviors in drawings.
Eventually, this algorithm will be used to analyze historical evidence to create an encyclopedia of scents.
Bembibre and his colleagues also reproduced a potpourri scent from the 1750s in the ancestral home of the Sackville-West family in Kent, described in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.
“It’s really hard to get the information you need to bring back smells,” said Bembibre:
“There are ‘nose witnesses’ who are alive now who can help us recreate smells.
