Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology

1. Introduction: Making Senses of the Past

1 1. Introduction: Making Senses of the Past Jo Day Correspondances La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, —Et d’autres, corrumpus, riches et triomphants, Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens, Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens. —Baudelaire (1972:10) A euphonic song of ecstasy of body and soul, Charles Baudelaire’s paean to a multisensory world evokes colors, sounds, and a rich array of scents. Perfumes as cool as infant skin, as soft as oboes, or as green as meadows perfectly capture the multisensory aspects of living and being. Indeed, such was the sensual nature of some of the poems in this collection of 1857, Les fleurs du Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, edited by Jo Day. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 40. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois Univer­ sity. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-8093-3287-8. 2 J. Day mal, that both the publisher and the poet were prosecuted for offending public morality.1 Baudelaire, of course, was not alone in understanding that the senses are the mediums through which humans experience their world, but while artists (in the broadest sense of the word) have generally been indulged with a certain amount of freedom for sensory explorations, such themes have only recently become accepted as legitimate subjects of academic investigations outside their more traditional home in the science laboratory. The proliferation in the last decade or so of journal articles and books concentrating on varying aspects of sensory studies in the humanities (e.g., Berg’s Sensory Formations series), as well the emergence of a new journal dedicated to this topic (The Senses and Society), testifies to an interdisciplinary interest in the actual bodily experience of being human, of tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, and seeing. Much of the initial impetus for this came from the Concordia Sensoria Research Team (Consert), based at Concordia University, Montreal. Consert members David Howes and Constance Classen have consistently produced work that both shapes and redefines sensory studies (Classen 1990, 1993, 1997, 2005; Howes 1991, 2003, 2005, 2009), and their influence, as well as that of Paul Stoller (1984, 1989, 1997), is evident across an array of disciplines including history, sociology, ethnography, sociocultural anthropology, food studies, human geography, art and cinema, and archaeology. It was the last of these, archaeology, and the senses that was the theme of the 27th Annual Visiting Scholar Conference at the Center for Archaeological Investigations , Southern Illinois University Carbondale, held in March 2010. The papers presented, many of them published in this volume, demonstrated the multiplicity of ways archaeologists are engaging with sensory studies.2 This is not the first book to take sensory archaeology as its subject; previous publications have focused on exploring specific aspects of the sensorium: for example, acoustics (Scarre and Lawson 2006) or color (Jones and MacGregor 2002). In contrast, this volume covers a broad spectrum of sensory modalities, highlighting their interconnections, as well as their distinct roles in past societies. Neither does it claim to be a how-to manual for “doing” sensory archaeology, a historiography of the subject, nor a detailed discussion of the theoretical foundations of a sensory approach to archaeology .3 It should be added that, in general, this volume does not venture into the realms of “science” (although see Chapter 12 for a summary of the workings of the human olfactory system). This is deliberate, and while archaeologists are indebted to the physiological and neurological discoveries that allow us to better understand the human sensory apparatus, this book is not the place for a detailed discussion of such things.4 No apology should be necessary for the broad range of material and sites included here, from the Aegean Bronze Age to the American Southwest; rather, this diversity should be embraced as stimulating and challenging and as evidence that a more embodied approach to the past is possible regardless of archaeological specialization. In fact, this endeavor gives...