Making Senses of the Past

Since the nineteenth century, museums have kept their artifacts in glass cases to better preserve them. This practice has led to an archaeology dominated by visual descriptions of relics, even though human interaction with the surrounding world involves the whole body and all of its senses. In the past few years, sensory archaeology has become more prominent, and Making Senses of the Past is one of the first collected volumes of its kind on this subject. The essays in this volume take readers on a multisensory journey around the world and across time, explore alternative ways to perceive past societies, and offer a new way of writing archaeology that incorporates each of the five senses.