Sensory archaeologies: a Vindolanda smellscape

Studies of urban smellscapes are often based on detailed contemporary reports and social studies and, crucially, are informed by geographical theory (see, for example, Classen, Howes and Synnott, 1994; Cockayne, 2007; Reinarz, 2014), but reconstructing the smellscapes of archaeological sites for which we cannot conduct these types of survey presents challenges. Recent publications have drawn attention to ancient smellscapes, and highlight the challenges of understanding how these may have been perceived in the past (Henshaw, 2014;Koloski- Ostrow, 2015; Morley, 2015). Henshaw writes that ‘cities in the past were highly odoriferous sites fuelled by gatherings of large numbers of people in concentrated areas and supported by a cycle of food and goods supply, waste production and removal. . . . [C]ities can be identified by their very nature as having always been sites of olfactory conflict, where negatively perceived odours combined with those that were more culturally acceptable’ (2014, p. 11), a description which generalises but encapsulates the smellscape of past urban spaces. This chapter explores the case study of the Roman fort and vicus at Vindolanda in order to demonstrate that it is possible to better understand the way in which individuals experienced the smellscape afforded by this Roman fort. This study will demonstrate that a sensory approach can further nuance our understanding of life at Roman military sites in the northern frontier region. This sort of study is possible at any archaeological site where a sufficient amount is known (or hypothesised) about the use of space via the site’s material culture (as demonstrated by other chapters in this volume).