皇家华人

Heritage scientist Cecilia Bembibre wants to add an extra dimension to the study of historic locations and objects: smell.

, a third year PhD student at 皇家华人 Institute for Sustainable Heritage, is travelling around England collecting the 鈥榮cent profiles鈥� of objects in historic collections. Using carbon sponges that absorb the organic compounds let off by objects, she then runs these samples through a gas chromatographer and a mass spectrometer to produce a kind of chemical blueprint for the object鈥檚 smell. She likens this to a recipe.

Chemically, scents can be broken down easily into their compounds. 鈥極ld book smell鈥�? That鈥檚 acetic acid, furfural, benzaldehyde, vanillin and hexanol you鈥檙e detecting. However, Bembibre is just as interested in the the cultural reception that different smells have received throughout history: 鈥淚n order to understand and archive a smell, we need to know about the human experience of it.鈥�

Bembibre鈥檚 research is currently focused on two sites: Knole House, a National Trust-owned estate built in the 17th Century and the setting of Virginia Woolf鈥檚 Orlando; and the library at St Paul鈥檚 Cathedral. These sites provide both a rich reservoir of scents and an archive of written materials to serve as historical context.

The perception of scent is, by nature, a bodily activity, and Bembibre has responded to this by leading a series of 鈥榮mell walks鈥�, encouraging participants to more actively engage in the 鈥榮mellscapes鈥� around them. She believes that research into smells can foster a multi-dimensional interaction with heritage and is keen to collaborate with researchers from disciplines such as anthropology to help us better understand the cultural context of our olfactory environment.