Recreating era-authentic odors belongs to historical interpretation as much as period furniture does

Evidence

Quite aside from education, the knowledge of an experience with odors is now seen as so important in the field of interpretation that when I was in Cooperstown there was a discussion of some method by which the old tavern could be given an authoritative tavern odor—a consideration that seemed to me just as important in bringing past into present as providing a historic structure with the furniture of the period. For it is part of the same aim: to give the visitor a sense of living the very experience of the ancestor. — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 351

Categorization

• XREF: Scent as historical medium connects to smellscape scholarship (the Soundscape/Deep-Listening lineage shifted to olfaction) and to Eco-Justice’s immersive multi-sensory reading-of-landscape thread. — connects to: Tactile, smell, and taste engagement is a durable human urge that interpretation underuses — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 348; Period settings become style quotations rather than lived worlds once fully aestheticized — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 170; Writers unfreeze antique feeling stored in physical objects of history — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1148

Broader Connections

• Period settings become style quotations rather than lived worlds once fully aestheticized #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 170
• Writers unfreeze antique feeling stored in physical objects of history #expands (0.80) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1148