Sensory Archaeology: Rethinking History Teaching

This month, we’re exploring how sensory archaeology transforms history teaching by bringing the past to life through touch, smell, sound, and embodied experience.  By moving beyond text and images, students engage more deeply, think more critically, and connect more meaningfully with diverse human histories.

Hearing the City, Feeling the Streets: Urban Life in the Ancient World

When we think of cities, we usually picture skylines, monuments, streets, and buildings. But for most of history, people experienced cities not as still images from above, but by moving through them. Cities were first heard, touched, and smelled before they were seen. Everyday life was shaped by sounds, surfaces, crowds, and constant movement. Sensory archaeology tries to recover these lost experiences by studying how infrastructure, buildings, and social systems created rich sensory environments that shaped daily life.

Instead of just seeing ancient cities as either grand or dirty, sensory archaeology looks at how urban environments shaped the way people experienced and understood their surroundings. Things like streets, walls, paving, lighting, sounds, climate, and everyday objects all influenced how people saw their city and their place in it.

In many ancient cities, the street formed the primary kinetic space through which urban life was experienced. Movement was not simply functional: it was sensory. Roman cities provide one of the clearest examples. From the second century BCE onwards, streets paved with dense basalt lava stone transformed urban movement into an acoustic and tactile experience. These streets have been described by sensory archaeologists as “auditory and kinaesthetic ribbons” (1) because they constantly returned sound and vibration to those moving across them. Wheels, hooves, and hobnailed sandals interacted with ruts, grooves, and uneven paving to produce the characteristic roar of the Roman city. 

This sensory environment was always changing. Rain made the stones slippery, so people had to walk differently. Mud and animal waste softened the sounds, changing how the street felt. In places like Pompeii, stepping stones helped people cross flooded roads, but their spacing made pedestrians, especially elite men in heavy togas, move carefully and deliberately. So, city design shaped not just how people got around, but also how they moved and acted in public.

The size and shape of streets also affected how people communicated. Roman 'street canyons' absorbed and reduced sound, creating natural sound barriers in the city. A speaker’s voice could quickly get lost in the noise of traffic, animals, tools, and crowds. To help with this, public buildings like porticoes became increasingly common. These structures did more than offer shade—they narrowed and partly enclosed streets, changing how sound travelled and making the city’s soundscape more varied.

Sensory archaeology also questions our modern ideas about how people saw cities in the past. In some historical settings, vision worked differently than it does today. For example, premodern Islamic cities have been called 'smooth spaces'—twisting, maze-like places that were hard to map or view from above. Their narrow, winding streets and enclosed courtyards meant people had to find their way by touch, closeness, and movement, not just by looking from a distance (2). In these cities, architecture focused more on surfaces than on depth. Decorated stucco, tiles, carved plaster, and textured walls were not just for looking through, but invited people to experience them by touch. Scholars call this the work of a 'fingering eye,' where people’s gaze moved slowly over textures and colors, almost as if they were touching them.

This way of experiencing the city also showed social hierarchy. In places like the Alhambra in Granada, rulers had special viewpoints called miradors. These carefully designed spots gave them wide views over landscapes and cities that were hidden from most people. Being able to see far became a symbol of power, which was very different from the limited and surface-focused experience of ordinary city dwellers (2).

Cities also created social inequality through sensory experiences. In Roman Pompeii, elite dining rooms were carefully arranged with polished silverware, fine linens, soft lighting, and elegant surroundings. In contrast, public bars or taverns, called tabernae, surrounded non-elite diners with strong smells, noisy conversations, rough pottery, and crowded spaces. These sensory differences reinforced social hierarchies just as much as buildings or wealth did.

A major new development in sensory archaeology is using digital technology to bring lost urban worlds back to life. In Historic Cairo, for example, researchers recreated the sounds of the Sabīl wa-Kuttāb Ismaʽil al-Maghlawī (3). With digital simulations, people today can hear flowing water, street noise, water carriers’ voices, and the collective recitation of the Quran, bringing back parts of city life that buildings alone cannot show.

Sensory archaeology shows us that cities were much more than just groups of buildings. They were lively places shaped by movement, sound, texture, climate, smell, light, and how people interacted with them. To truly understand ancient city life, we need to ask not just what cities looked like, but what it felt like to live in them.

(1) Veitch, J.D., 2019. Cities and urbanism. In Skeates, R. and Day, J. eds., The Routledge handbook of sensory archaeology (pp. 266-280). Routledge.

(2) O’Meara, S., 2019. Haptic vision: Making surface sense of Islamic material culture. In In Skeates, R. and Day, J. eds., The Routledge Handbook of Sensory Archaeology (pp. 467-478). Routledge.

(3) El-Dardiry, A., Ali Ahmed ElKhateeb, A. and El Antably, A. . (2024) “Water plays : The architectural and acoustic reconstruction of Sabīl wa Kuttāb of Ismaʽīl al-Maghlawī”, Studies in Digital Heritage, 8(1), pp. 1–21. doi: 10.14434/sdh.v8i1.37889.

14/05/2025

If you want to listen to our podcast on this topic: check our Spotify episode (open link).

Sound, Smell, Darkness, and the Senses of the Dead

Sensory archaeology has transformed the study of funerary practice by asking a deceptively simple question: what did death feel like? Rather than treating tombs, cremations, and grave goods as static archaeological data, sensory archaeology investigates how death was experienced through touch, sound, smell, movement, light, and bodily interaction. In doing so, it reveals funerary ritual not simply as symbolic behaviour, but as an active attempt to negotiate one of the most difficult realities of human existence: the physical transformation of the body after death.

Death is, above all, profoundly sensory. In many societies, the confirmation of death itself occurs through touch: the cooling of the skin, the absence of breath, the stillness of the body. Ethnographic and archaeological evidence suggests that in most cultures the dead were not initially handled by specialists, but by family members and close communities. Washing, dressing, wrapping, carrying, or arranging the corpse involved intimate tactile engagement with a body that was simultaneously familiar and rapidly changing. Sensory archaeology therefore emphasizes that funerary ritual emerged not only from belief systems, but also from direct bodily encounters with death itself.

This confrontation with decay lies at the centre of many mortuary practices. The decomposition of human tissue releases chemicals such as putrescine, which trigger strong biological reactions in living humans. Across cultures, rituals often attempt to negotiate or soften this process by restoring order, identity, or humanity to the dead body. Hair may be styled, cosmetics applied, limbs arranged carefully, or food and drink offered to the deceased. Such acts are not merely decorative; they actively resist the sensory disruption caused by decomposition and preserve social bonds between the living and the dead.

Some funerary traditions went further by attempting to visually deny death itself. Mesolithic burials, for example, sometimes positioned bodies in life-like postures that projected familiar human sensitivities—companionship, sleep, comfort—onto the deceased. Through arrangement and display, the dead could continue to appear socially present even as the body physically transformed.

Sound also played a critical role in funerary ritual. Recent reconstructions of Anglo-Saxon cremation ceremonies have demonstrated how overwhelming the “auditory landscape of death” could be. Beyond the continuous roar of the pyre, mourners would have heard the cracking of timber, the snapping of bones under heat, and the shifting of the body within the flames. Different materials added to the fire altered the acoustic atmosphere, while chanting, percussion, or singing often accompanied the cremation process. Sound therefore became one of the primary ways in which participants perceived transformation occurring.

Other funerary environments manipulated acoustics more deliberately. Fieldwork in painted Etruscan tombs has shown that these spaces amplified certain frequencies and adapted to particular forms of sound, such as female vocals or lyre music. Tomb architecture could effectively be “played” like an instrument, with walls, chambers, and bodily positioning shaping the movement of echoes through the interior space. In this sense, tombs functioned not merely as repositories for the dead, but as performative ritual environments designed to orchestrate sensory experience.

Smell formed another crucial dimension of funerary ritual. Across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, aromatic oils, incense, flowers, and perfumes were burned or applied to bodies in order to mask decomposition and distinguish funerary space from everyday life. In Roman chamber tombs, the smell of oils may have lingered physically on mourners as they re-entered the world of the living, carrying traces of the tomb back into daily existence. In ancient Egypt, fragrance possessed even deeper significance. Perfumed ointments and oils were believed to transmit divine radiance to the deceased, transforming scent into a medium of spiritual transition.

Light and darkness further shaped funerary experience. Megalithic tombs and caves created what sensory archaeologists describe as “darkscapes”: environments in which the near-permanent exclusion of light intensified all other senses. Within these spaces, sound, smell, and bodily proximity became amplified. The flicker of torchlight across polished stone, obsidian, or reflective grave goods could produce fleeting visual effects that signalled the continued presence of the dead even after bodily decay had erased familiar facial features.

In some contexts, light itself became carefully orchestrated within funerary architecture. Certain Bronze Age tombs in the Aegean were aligned so that sunlight entered the burial chamber at specific moments during the year, transforming solar movement into part of the ritual experience. Here, architecture manipulated cosmological cycles to connect death with renewal, transition, or divine order.

Sensory archaeology also reminds us that these practices are not confined to the distant past. Modern spontaneous memorials—flowers left at accident sites, candles, cards, photographs, teddy bears—operate through similar sensory principles. They fill spaces marked by absence with colour, texture, smell, and material presence. Such memorials attempt to soften the sensory void created by loss and sustain emotional connections between the living and the dead.

(06/05/2026)

If you want to listen to our podcast on this topic: check our Spotify episode (open link).

Reawakening the Past: The Case for Sensory Archaeology in History Teaching 

There is a persistent mismatch between how we teach the past and how the past was actually lived. Classrooms tend to privilege sight, text, and abstraction, while human experience, past as present, has always been multisensory, embodied, and deeply contextual. Sensory archaeology offers a way to address this gap, not as a superficial add-on, but as a fundamental shift in how historical knowledge is approached, constructed, and communicated.

One of its most immediate pedagogical strengths lies in its ability to transform the classroom environment itself. Modern teaching spaces are often sensorially limited, designed for efficiency rather than engagement. Within such settings, students can easily become passive recipients of information, expected to absorb rather than interrogate knowledge. Sensory archaeology disrupts this dynamic by reintroducing movement, interaction, and experiential prompts into learning. Even small interventions—handling materials, imagining textures, evoking smells, reconstructing soundscapes—can alter the atmosphere of a lesson. They encourage students to participate actively in the production of knowledge rather than positioning them as empty vessels to be filled. This shift is not merely about engagement in a superficial sense; it fundamentally changes the cognitive process, making learning more exploratory, dialogic, and memorable.

Memory itself plays a crucial role here. Sensory stimuli are closely tied to how we retain and recall information. When learning is anchored in embodied experience, it becomes more durable and meaningful. A concept linked to a smell, a texture, or a physical action is far more likely to be retained than one encountered only through text. In this way, sensory archaeology helps create educational experiences that are not only engaging in the moment but enduring over time. It establishes a mood of enquiry that invites curiosity and fosters deeper intellectual investment.

At the same time, sensory approaches encourage students to move beyond rote learning and into more complex forms of critical thinking. Asking what something looked like is relatively straightforward; asking how it felt, smelled, or sounded requires interpretation, inference, and imagination grounded in evidence. Students are prompted to consider aspects of the past that are not immediately visible in the archaeological record, and in doing so they begin to formulate original research questions. This process challenges the assumption that knowledge is fixed and instead emphasises its constructed nature. It also highlights the limitations of traditional methodologies, which have often privileged what can be seen and measured over what can be experienced.

This has significant implications for questions of equality, diversity, and inclusion. Sensory archaeology is inherently open to multiple perspectives because it draws on embodied experience, which varies across individuals and cultures. Students are able to bring their own backgrounds—whether shaped by diet, language, environment, or cultural practice—into the interpretative process. This plurality enriches discussion and challenges the dominance of singular, often Western or elite viewpoints that have historically shaped the discipline. By focusing on lived experience, sensory approaches also make it easier to access the histories of groups that are underrepresented in traditional narratives, including women, enslaved individuals, and migrants. These are histories that are often difficult to reconstruct through textual or monumental evidence alone, but which can be approached through the textures of everyday life.

There is also a practical dimension to this inclusivity. Fieldwork and site visits, while invaluable, are not always accessible to all students due to financial, physical, or logistical constraints. Sensory archaeology offers a way to simulate aspects of these experiences within the classroom, making dynamic, experiential learning possible regardless of resources. In this sense, it is both a pedagogical and an ethical tool, widening participation while maintaining intellectual rigour.

Another important contribution of sensory archaeology lies in its ability to reconnect students with the material world. Many learners today are accustomed to engaging with information primarily through digital interfaces. While this offers many advantages, it can also distance them from the physicality of past lives. Sensory approaches counter this by foregrounding the body as a site of knowledge. They invite students to consider not just what people in the past did, but how those actions were experienced. This shift is crucial for understanding the cultural logic behind behaviour. It moves interpretation away from simplistic notions of efficiency or rationality and towards a more nuanced appreciation of how cultural values, habits, and sensory preferences shape human action.

In doing so, sensory archaeology plays a key role in humanising the past. It allows students to imagine themselves in different historical contexts, not in a reductive or anachronistic way, but through a careful consideration of embodied experience. Reflecting on something as mundane as taste, texture, or physical effort can open up broader questions about identity, adaptation, and cultural difference. It becomes possible to understand not just what people did, but why those actions made sense within their own sensory worlds.

Equally important is the development of reflexivity. Engaging with sensory evidence requires students to confront their own assumptions about what feels normal, comfortable, or desirable. These assumptions are often shaped by modern, culturally specific experiences, and recognising them is a crucial step in avoiding anachronistic interpretations. Sensory archaeology thus trains students to be more self-aware and critical in their analytical approach, skills that are essential not only in archaeology but across the humanities.

This reflexive practice is closely linked to the interdisciplinary nature of sensory studies. Interpreting sensory experience in the past requires the integration of multiple forms of evidence, from material culture and environmental data to textual sources and experimental reconstruction. Students learn to navigate between these different types of evidence, developing a more holistic understanding of historical processes. This mirrors the complexity of real-world research and prepares them for advanced study and professional practice.

Ultimately, the incorporation of sensory archaeology into history teaching is not simply about making lessons more engaging, although it undoubtedly achieves that. It is about rethinking what it means to study the past in the first place. By foregrounding the senses, we move towards a more comprehensive understanding of human experience, one that acknowledges complexity, diversity, and embodiment. In doing so, we reintroduce creativity and imagination into a system that is often constrained by standardisation, while also equipping students with the critical and reflexive skills needed to navigate both the past and the present.

Source:  Rowan, E. 2024. The Pedagogical Benefits of Sensory Archaeology: A Case Study on Roman Britain. Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal 6(1): 1–23. 

05/05/2026