100 books like Archaeology and the Senses

A gruesome story of murder and desire that also happens to have the most vivid olfactory descriptions of any genre.

Suskind’s preternatural ability to summon odor from the page makes you feel as if you are there beside him, walking through the flowered hillsides of Provence, or in the back room of a perfume shop on the Pont au Change. His twisted use of classic perfume techniques is as accurate as it is chilling.

Exploring how and why Romans built their houses to impact all bodily senses sits at the heart of my book.

Whilst interest in planning and building for such full body experiences in architecture today has declined, Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin presents a compelling argument for the importance of understanding the role of the multiple bodily senses in our experience of built spaces around us.

Divided into two main sections, the first of these examines the pre-eminence of sight in the West and its detrimental impact on architectural practise and our built environs.

The second part considers the role played our other bodily senses in experiencing architecture and proposes a new approach to building design and construction which seeks to integrate full sensory experience into the architectural process.

Historian Mark Smith has written widely on the topic of understanding sensory experiences of the past.

At just over 100 pages long, his most recent book is an excellent insight into the field for both those new to it, and those who are already familiar with writing history of the senses.

Starting with an overview of the origins of sensory history and moving through to consider both the strengths and challenges of current research in this area, Smith concludes this book with a clear, accessible, and persuasive argument for future directions of work in the field.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone interested in exploring sensory history!

A classic of cultural history that shows how thoroughly smell shapes our lived experience.

Corbin details how different (and generally worse) France smelled in the past, and how this world of miasmas and insalubrious airs dictated hygiene practices and social interactions. More recent works, like Jonathan Reinarz’ Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell have further built on the treatment of odor as a powerful cultural force.

Told in lyrical language, two children wander through their city, looking for “wild” and finding it in motion, size, sounds, touch, and smell.“It leaps and pounces and  shows its teeth.” The words dance around, hinting at flora and fauna, using adjectives and verbs to suggest and evoke. This journey arouses awareness of the natural world that lives all around us in the city. Young readers will enjoy guessing what is being hinted at. This is such an original way to talk about the urban wild!  

What did Tudor England look, sound, or smell like?

This is an innovative work from Amy Licence, historian of women's lives. Using the five senses, she skilfully plunges readers into sixteenth-century England, letting us see, hear, smell, taste, and (almost) touch the Tudor world like we've never experienced it before.

There’s a hidden world within our own that's stranger than the best-written fantasy. We humans can't perceive it, but various other animals can, and this book opens the door to it.

Birds see hundreds of millions of colors our eyes can’t. Ants use chemicals we can’t detect to call massive gatherings and spread alarms. Fire-chaser beetles sense heat from fires dozens of miles away.  

The impossible desire to perceive the world in these astonishing ways makes me want to stop every passing butterfly to ask what it’s like to taste things with your feet. Of course, I can’t, so I’ll satisfy myself by enjoying Ed Yong’s thorough research, vivid descriptions, and clever commentary and letting my imagination run wild.

This is THE book to read on the senses, so I’m stating the obvious here. But let me tell you why it must be at the top of my list. Diane Ackerman takes us through a series of sensuous experiences, from extreme cold to a delicious massage to a thought-provoking meal.

But what’s remarkable is that because she’s a poet, her words pull you out of your mind and into your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin cells. Here’s just one line. “Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. But they are shapes; they bring the world into focus, corral ideas, hone thoughts, paint watercolors of perception.” Like it? This book is full of them, and they left me tingling.

Perceptual psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum’s book changed the way I thought about my brain on blindness and gave me hope about its ability to adapt. I was astonished by blind painters and mountain bikers, but more importantly, I learned that what often strike us as superpowers, are actually the result of practice and the cross-modal plasticity of the brain. The sighted brains that change after only five days of blindfold and intensive braille training, the experiments that demonstrate how humans can follow a scent trail, and the ways blind people (and sighted people) use echolocation to learn about their micro and macro environments (even if they are not always conscious of it), are just some of Rosenblum’s many examples that are as fun as they are fascinating.

These poems—most of every poem that Lee writes, really—do more than paint a picture. These poems appeal to every one of your senses. They are rich in description and you want to savor each one, sit with it, and let the poem envelop you. 

I heard or read somewhere that Li-Young Lee is a slow writer, not producing a lot of work but always producing good work. I don’t know if this is true, and except for my greed of wanting to consume more of his words asap, I don’t mind that his poems are slower coming. I like to spend time with them.

I share Rose because Lee teaches me—and my students—that writers depend too much on visual imagery and fear spreading out into the other senses.