Synaesthetic landscapes: looking for the missing senses in an eighteenth-century palace in Mafra, Portugal

ABSTRACT

In 1781, a book discussing the relationship between cats and dogs was published in Lisbon. Among the illustrations, there is a representation of a palace, more precisely the Marquess of Ponte de Lima palace in Mafra, Portugal. This illustration reveals how this space was lived and felt not only by the observer but also by all the human and non-human agents that circulated and existed in this space. The palace still exists, it is a public building, and 241 years later, we, as archaeologists, visited the palace. We observed its architecture, touched its walls, and heard how sound would propagate, trying to use our senses to feel the space. After the visit, we sat down and discussed how we perceived the place. We then returned to the late eighteenth-century representation and debated how visual stimulation can provoke a sensorial experience of a place we never smelled or listened to. This paper aims to debate whether we can use past representations of still-existing spaces to understand how different agents effectively reacted to different environments and how those representations influenced the way we engage with such spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Phenomenology
• sensorial experiences
• synaesthesia
• palace

Introduction

How many studies exist about phenomenology in archaeology? Even without realizing they use a phenomenological approach, how many researchers use sensorial experiences to engage with the past? And how many of them work with the not-so-distant past? Except for a small number of research examples, phenomenological archaeology is essentially focused on the landscapes of the remote past. Thus, while ancient societies are frequently approached by employing this method and theory in the reconstruction of past narratives, the same cannot be said about post-medieval landscapes. In fact, Adrian Praetzelis wrote in 2015 that ‘I tried to find a good example of phenomenological analysis in historical archaeology. No luck. Perhaps this is because the wealth of archival documentation makes us think we already understand the people of the recent past' (Praetzelis 2015, 151). Eight years later, despite our efforts, we could not locate any example either. Thus, we tried to defy that paucity by developing a sensorial approach to an eighteenth-century example. However, we decided to go a bit further. Instead of working on an open landscape, as the usual case studies in phenomenology do, we chose differently and entered a building (Olsen 2023, 7).

This does not mean that concepts such as landscape are not used in post-medieval archaeological studies, and often, as an example, we encounter that word associated with projects about medieval rural occupations or industrial areas, to name a few (Rao and Sebastiani 2023; Shackel and Palus 2006). However, when reading about rural medieval landscapes or nineteenth-century industrial ones, these studies never engage with the way phenomenologists methodologically read a past landscape using all our senses and bodies. Our purpose is to show how we could use the theoretical and methodological work developed by phenomenology in archaeology, adding other tools that would help us read and reconstruct the recent past.

For this paper, phenomenological archaeology is another way of trying to build post-medieval past narratives by exploring the subjective experiences and perceptions of people who lived in the past using our sensorial feelings. To do so, we chose as a case study an eighteenth-century palace from which a depiction of the kitchen is known. This palace was selected with the dual goal of testing the possible advantages and challenges of applying a phenomenological approach, on the one hand, to a historical context, on the other hand, using sources traditionally seen as merely visual. But why was this palace chosen and not any other building? First, the building in question still stands in the same place today as in the eighteenth century. However, its interior has been completely altered, forcing us to use our minds, bodies, and senses in the reconstruction of past environments. Second, there is a representation full of details of the palace’s interior, more precisely of its kitchen. Thus, these two factors allow us to fulfil both parts of our objective.

In a 2008 paper, C. Tilley wrote that ‘studying landscapes through texts, maps, photographs, paintings can provide only relatively superficial and abstracted knowledge. There is no substitute for personal experience’. Well, we actually disagree. What can be done, then, when there are no other options available? What if the only remaining structure is too compromised, impacting our experience? Is it possible to use pictures in a phenomenological manner? We believe that every source of information can help construct a sensorial approach to the past. We will confront Tilley’s opinion that it is not possible to do phenomenology through pictures. We believe that even using less sensorial experiences, using a picture versus a sensorial dive into a physical landscape where an archaeological site exists, provides useful information. To do so, we will intentionally stimulate a part of our brains to visually develop other sensorial perceptions by doing a synaesthetic reading of a past environment. By synaesthesia, we consider a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to experiences in another sensory or cognitive pathway, blending or mixing the senses. To our knowledge, a synaesthetic sensorial reading of a site or landscape was never done in archaeology and the way different senses have been considered in archaeology is mostly related to artefacts (Day 2011).

The decision to take this path of analysis of an old building through a phenomenological reading, although having different motivations, was mainly driven by our shared interest in archaeological theory and the attempt to create new approaches using different theories. We wanted to do some work that took advantage of our three distinct backgrounds. We were familiar both with the existence of the palace and with the engraving. We wanted to analyse it following a novel perspective and approach in phenomenological readings, such as a multisensorial approach and synaesthetic readings. The persistence of the palace in the same exact location, notwithstanding the alterations it suffered, leveraged the tangible connection to the past offered by the standing building. The scarcity of phenomenological analysis in historical archaeology for recent periods gave us the final stimulus to start this work, especially since most reconstructions of this period are exclusively based on archival documentation and textual sources.

Phenomenology, senses, and synaesthesia

In this paper, we aim to explore a non-traditional phenomenological approach that does not rely solely on the existing structures of a palace. We will also examine the eighteenth-century picture mentioned earlier. Why a picture? Before replying to this interrogation, let us answer a different question. What is phenomenology? The study of phenomenology examines the essential aspects that allow people to perceive the world through their physical senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. This human experience of the world and how we interpret it are essential elements of our being (Thomas 2008). We refer to an approach that emphasizes the study of human experiences and perceptions. It involves understanding past societies’ worldviews, beliefs, emotions, and behaviours through the interpretation of archaeological evidence, seeking to reconstruct the subjective aspects of past human existence, and aiming to understand how people in the past perceived and interacted with their environment, artefacts, and social structures. This approach often involves a close examination of individual and collective experiences, as well as the cultural contexts in which these experiences occurred. Phenomenology in archaeology highlights the importance of empathy, imagination, and reflexivity in interpreting the archaeological record and aims to provide insights into the lived experiences of people in the past.

However, this is not a simple task since, according to some authors, it is a well-established fact that Western modernist archaeology is built on a philosophical and social framework rooted in Aristotle’s ideas. The hierarchy established by this framework has unjustly devalued sensory experiences by placing sight and hearing above touch, smell, and taste. This prioritization of sight, above all else, has resulted in a significant bias towards visual perception in landscape phenomenology. Although some attempts have been made to incorporate other senses, this bias remains prevalent (Hamilakis 2011).

We emphasize this approach since we are conscious of the possible criticisms that might be addressed regarding our choice. Yes, we know that the world has changed so much since the eighteenth century that the stimuli we receive from it are most likely different from the ones people felt in the past. We also know that we are so culturally diverse from those people that our interpretation will most likely risk being anachronic. With this being said, we understand it would be almost impossible to demonstrate how people felt about landscapes, structures, or anything we are studying (Brück 2005; Fleming 2006). Nonetheless, as Matthew Johnson argues, we ask ‘What alternative do you have in mind?’ (2012, 279). We agree with Julian Thomas that ‘how a phenomenon presents itself to us in the present is only one step in attempting to understand how it might have presented itself in a past context’ (2008, 305). It is like a window. Although blurred, it remains a window.

However, we would like to go beyond the traditional phenomenological approach, where only a narrow range of data is used, mainly focusing on landscape and architecture. Almost no consideration is given to more detailed on-site information, even if accessible (Brück 2005; Hamilakis 2011, 2013). And here enters our picture. But why use a picture since this ‘non-traditional approach’ reinforces the vision sense?

The study of pictures with a phenomenological approach is not, despite Tilley’s refusal, new. Tim Ingold (1993) had already promoted such experience, and even if Ingold does not describe himself as a phenomenologist, he uses insights drawn from the close observation of things, one of the characteristics of phenomenology (Thomas 2008). Ingold used the Harvesters from Bruegel the Elder, and, albeit not having phenomenological readings in mind, the final result is pretty phenomenological. Sentences such as ‘the sense of a rustic harmony’ regarding all scenes, or when Ingold (1993, 164–171) invites us to ‘imagine ourselves sit down on the very landscape depicted’ where we can not only look at it but we can ‘hear it too, for the scene does not unfold in silence’ are just the beginning of Ingold’s invitation to use other senses than sight. The most phenomenological description arises when Ingold talks about people, which is rather complex and tricky in traditional archaeological approaches. People from the past walk no more in nowadays landscapes, but they do in pictures. Like Ingold says:

We do not only see them, but we also listen. The air is full of sounds of one kind and another. You hear the clatter of wooden spoons on bowls, the slurp of the drinker, and the loud snores of the party member who is outstretched in sleep. But We can hear the swish of scythes as well against the cornstalks or the call of the birds as they swoop low over the fields in search of prey, or even sounds outside the picture that comes with the wind of people conversing and playing far away. (Ingold 1993, 164–171)

In other words, Ingold shows us that we should not view sight as a superior sense but, rather, recognize its interconnectedness with our other senses. This includes acknowledging how our visual experiences are shaped by touch, smell, and sound and how they all work together to create a holistic understanding of the world around us. By understanding the importance of all our senses, we can develop a more nuanced and inclusive approach to perceiving and interacting with our environment. The way the brain reacts to images and the senses that those images may awaken is not new, and neuroscience has already debated this (Abbasov 2021; Gallese 2018; Wassiliwizky and Menninghaus 2021). However, we did not find any specific references to how images of the past could create neural responses connected to other senses.

Considering the use of synaesthesia by archaeologists, Yannis Hamilakis wrote that ‘All sensorial experience is synesthetic; it is activated and enacted by the merging of different sensory modalities’ (2013, 410–411), and if phenomenology is about sensorial experience, thus we can say that all phenomenological readings of the past are synaesthetic. But what do we mean when we talk about synaesthesia? Synaesthesia is a peculiar occurrence that involves a specific characteristic of a stimulus inducing a secondary experience that is not usually associated with the initial one. One example is lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, where words can elicit a taste sensation. There are more than 60 acknowledged variations of synaesthesia, with some investigators describing encounters related to colour, taste, touch, and sound (Banissy, Jonas, and Kadosh 2014). However, there is a question that we need to pose to ourselves: is Ingold hearing those sounds? Or is this a product of his imagination and memory? Or both? The answer to this is far more complex, especially when the purpose is the construction of past narratives.

Science can provide an answer. Specific scientific experiments reveal that our brain can activate parts usually triggered by other senses, such as hearing or smelling, solely by using one sense – like sight (Gottfried et al. 2004). Our individual past episodic memories inside our brain have multisensory quality, even if the way these sensory qualities are integrated into a unified memory needs to be better understood. Experiences show that the retrieval clue, the trigger, coming from one sense (sight, for example), will induct sensory-specific neural activity from a different sense (hearing or smelling). These experiences imply that the representation of original episodes is preserved inside our brain in a multisensorial way and can be intentionally retrieved or, as happened to all of us in the past, incidentally recovered. A small sample is enough to trigger the place where these memories are (Gottfried et al. 2004). Science supports the possible benefits of interpreting a picture in a phenomenological way to comprehend the past, so the question is: how can we use pictures to trigger our brain to retrieve the information that is already there, like smells or sounds (Figure 1)?

Figure 1. Different senses activate certain parts of the brain where the feeling of other senses is stored and can be observable using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Doing phenomenology in an eighteenth-century palace

The place we chose for our phenomenological reading is the Marquess of Ponte de Lima palace. Firstly, regarding the palace, the building is in Mafra, a Portuguese town situated near Lisbon (the capital) and mostly known because of its monumental palace-convent, the largest Portuguese building built in the eighteenth century by order of King João V. Some metres ahead of this important construction that stands at the top of a hill lies ‘our’ palace (Figure 2). The building stands in the place once occupied by a Romanesque-Gothic castle and later by a Medieval palace. Other essential elements are associated with the medieval occupation of the place, such as parts of the earlier castle walls, a Garden House, a lime kiln, and the church of Santo André (thirteenth/fourteenth century) (Paixão, 2014, 65–66). The Marquess of Ponte de Lima palace received that name during the reign of Maria I (r.1777–1816) precisely because it was at this time that the marquessate of Ponte de Lima was attributed to the family who lived there, the viscounts of Vila Nova de Cerveira (Corredoura 2008–2009, 196).

Figure 2. Map showing the location of the palace within the village of Mafra.

The modern palace was built in the seventeenth century or beginning of the eighteenth century, although the architect who conceived the building has yet to be discovered. However, it would have been austere, stripped down, simple, and, at the same time, practical, without being overly decorated, as was characteristic of the so-called ‘chã’ architecture. It was a rectangular building with gabled roofs and three floors, the two lower floors being partially buried due to the slope of the terrain (Corredoura 2008–2009, 196; Mateus 2013, 29; Paixão 2014, 65, 71). There is limited information on the palace’s kitchen. Still, it is known that this division was the subject of works carried out by the mason António Miranda and carpenter António Baptista Corvo around 1744, these works being referred to in the Inspection Act dated 22 November 1744 (Loussado 1744)

The palace is surrounded by gardens marked by paths and a dense forest, with statues, lakes, fountains and ponds, a house garden, and two chapels (Figures 3 and 4). In the eighteenth century, when King João V visited Mafra to accompany the works of the monumental palace-convent, he stayed there. Nowadays, standing in the palace and looking at the inside of the property, one can still see part of the gardens that once stood there. However, when looking at the street, today’s reality seems to differ immensely from the eighteenth century. The surroundings are now occupied with several habitations, and the space has taken a new urban life. Nonetheless, this would have been a less populated area surrounded by nature in the past, with the palace being the most impressive building until the royal construction.

Figure 3. The outer side of the palace.

Figure 4. The palace garden.

The ambience in this place was described by William Beckford when he travelled through Portugal in the last quarter of the eighteenth century:

The perspective that one enjoys from the churchyard – of the Basilica – of Mafra is not very interesting: what one sees are the roofs of an insignificant village and some hills of sand, standing out over a narrow strip of ocean. From the left, the view is limited by the steep hills of Sintra and to the right, a pine forest, on the viscount of Ponte de Lima manor, which gives the eyes some refreshment. (Beckford 1787–1788, quoted in Corredoura 2008–2009, 196; translated by the authors)

Interestingly, not many years later, the French traveller Marc Marie, Marquis de Bombelles, praising the woods and gardens surrounding the palace, criticized the building for being infested with fleas and other insects (Corredoura 2008–2009, 196).

In its apogee, the palace was the home of one of the wealthiest families in the country. Since then, it has served as the stage for several important moments and become entangled with many people, animals, senses, and stories. The building served as the temporary residence of King João V, as the stage of a conspiracy against King João VI in 1806, and as a shelter for the French general Loison in the following years (during the French invasion). The palace was later adapted to become a manor, and at this time its vast agricultural area, forest, and scented gardens were particularly notorious; from these, the garden house and the lime kiln stood out. At the end of the nineteenth century, the building was used to house an improvised hospital during the bubonic plague. Still, in the nineteenth century, a Portuguese archaeologist named Estacio da Veiga conducted some excavations in this place (Corredoura 2008–2009, 198–199; Mateus 2013, 29; Paixão 2014, 66–68). The palace was then abandoned for several decades. This state was captured by the Portuguese writer Alberto Pimentel in his book Sem Passar a Fronteira:

[…] I stopped to look at the old palace of the Marquess of Ponte de Lima. It is also said that from a window of the palace, bordering the church door, the nobleman used to listen to mass. Finding the door open, I went in. I went through all the rooms; I was in the Marquess’s room, which had an alcove and a stove. The tile baseboard is even less badly preserved. I went to the chapel, where I found a clay altarpiece, which would be easy to restore, and some mutilated saints, dismounted on the ground. Then, thinking about the decadence of the illustrious families, I set off down the path, enjoying the solitude of the place. (Pimentel 1902, 104; translated by the authors)

A couple of decades later, in 1926, the building was auctioned, and the same happened again 11 years later, but the abandonment and degradation continued. Finally, the space was sold to the Municipality of Mafra in 1989 for 130 million ‘escudos’ to build an inn and a Municipal Sports Park. A school for rehabilitating children with special needs, a primary school, and a high school were also installed in the palace in the same year (Corredoura 2008–2009, 199; Paixão 2014, 68–69). The palace was restored between 2011 and 2015, and then occupied by a non-governmental organization that still uses it today. It currently houses a ‘museum of values’ and accommodation comprising 15 rooms, but these facets are inactive due to the housing of refugee families from the ongoing war in Ukraine (Universidade dos Valores, n.d..).

Moving on to the 1781 depiction (Figure 5), it is the kitchen of this palace, as stated earlier, that is illustrated in a print, a metal engraving made by Manuel da Silva Godinho in the eighteenth century. The image is included in the eighteenth-century book Gaticanea or ‘The Cruel War Between Dogs and Cats, Decided in a Bloody Battle in the Great Square of the Royal Village of Mafra’ by João Jorge de Carvalho (Carvalho 1781). The text was first published in 1781, and is considered an allegory about the intrigues of the court. This heroic-comic poem of four parts recounts a war between dogs and cats unfolding in Mafra, culminating in the enormous battle that the dogs win. The engraving in question illustrates one of the scenes in the text, the incident that gives rise to the entire war: spurred on by hunger, the dog Carroça raids the palace’s kitchens. However, inside is the cat Ministro, who will end up biting his back and pride, and thus the conflict begins.

Figure 5. The 1781 representation of the kitchen.

The phenomenological approach

Our goal was to establish whether varying degrees of familiarity with the topic would trigger specific brain areas, resulting in distinct experiences and facilitating our understanding of past events. Would it not be wonderful to use pictures (not refusing the idea that these could also be sounds, smells, textures, and tastes) to understand phenomenologically how people felt in the past? As said, contrarily to archaeological landscapes nowadays, images have past people in them, but also representations and suggestions of movement, sounds, and smells. Are we able to reach them through phenomenology?

Our methodological approach was to have three different phenomenological experiences corresponding to the three of us. Two of us experienced the building phenomenologically, one with a vast background knowledge regarding eighteenth-century palatial buildings while the other did not have that knowledge. The last of us did not experience the building, only the print.

For the first phenomenological experience, the one in the palace, we entered the property where the building still stands. To fulfil this objective, we tried to use Chris Tilley’s (2008) seven-step methodology that we adapted to what we were trying to develop. Generally speaking, these seven steps are a way of engaging with the landscape through the senses by: visiting and walking the site; recording the sensory feelings when visiting sites; revisiting the same places several times; approaching these places from different directions; observing how the landscape changed; visiting and exploring and recording ‘natural’ places within the landscape; and drawing together all these observations and experiences. Tilley’s approach was made for pre-historic sites where the vibrancy of urban density is not even a discussion (Tilley 1994). Thus, our phenomenological approach was not made rigidly following these predefined patterns of analysis but was adapted to the current urban situations.

For our first phenomenological experience, we walked around the building before we entered, to get an idea of the size, location, and topography. We had to really open our minds since we knew that most of the palace was gone or changed, becoming a school, a museum, and a house for refugees. Then we entered and confirmed that most of it does not exist anymore. Except for the walls and structure, most of what is observable has changed (Figures 6–9). Considering what phenomenologists defend, even though a lot has changed in the world if the basic outlines of the landscape are maintained (Tilley thinks they go back to the Mesolithic), a phenomenological experience is possible. So, if the palace structure still stands, we would be likely to experience it. However, the two of us who entered the palace had different experiences. The one of us with the eighteenth-century-building knowledge, although not having entered this palace before, had an idea of what to expect: a big room, a few bed chambers, a master chamber, and a kitchen on the ground floor since all palaces were more or less built this way (Casimiro and Boavida 2024; Franco 2016). Conversely, the other one of us had no eighteenth-century-building knowledge, consequently having a much closer approach to Tilley’s methods since she entered the palace without any expectations and had difficulty imagining the original situation. While the one with the most experience could locate the palace area where the kitchen in the 1781 engraving was, the second questioned herself often whether anything from the original building had survived. Still, we entered the building and, except for some closed areas, we were able to see every architectonic feature that had survived, either in situ or in its new place, experience and embody the different dimensions of the place, touch its original walls, visit the nowadays kitchen (located in the same place as the old one), climb the stairs, and so on. As aforementioned, a lot has changed. The palace was adapted to new forms of dwelling in the world, and it was modernized, reduced, and reinvented.

Figure 6. One of the palace arches.

Figure 7. One of the palace walls.

Figure 8. Palace floor.

Figure 9. Contemporary kitchen.

The second phenomenological experience had to be done differently since the one Tilley proposed was unsuitable for the analysis of one image. Initially, we scrutinized the picture for an extended period, meticulously analysing every element until we were confident that we had comprehended every aspect of the palace’s visible section. Then, we transported ourselves inside the scene. From thereon, we were travelling inside the picture, trying to hear the noises and smell the scents. The following excerpts are a part of that journey experienced by three different people:

Tânia: When I entered the palace, I knew what to expect. After two decades as an archaeologist and researcher, I did not hope to see anything as it once was, especially in a building completely refurbished in the 21^st century. Only the walls, and even those must have changed, can tell us the tales of this place. The arches are the same, and most doors and windows as well, but once inside and having the picture in my mind, I was able to feel what I was seeing. I heard the sound of children giggling and climbing up the stairs. The cat meowed, and the dog barked. I find it strange that only one dog and one cat are on the scene because every archaeological excavation shows us that there were dozens of them inside houses (Casimiro et al. 2023). The fire was crackling while warming up the stew inside the cast iron pot … oh and it smelled so good. A mixture of carrots, turnips, cabbage, and lamb, with butter and seasoned with black pepper, a smell that originated from reading 17^th and 18^th-century recipes (Rodrigues 1693). I stepped on that floor, but I knew that my shoes did not make the same sound as a shoe made in the 1700s and that my skirts did not restrict my movements so my body was free to climb stairs and I most likely moved faster. Those large stone slabs once walked on are now used as tables in the garden, but in my mind, I was able to relocate them on the palace floor.

Inês: Standing in the doorway to the kitchen, I am both cold and warm, a mixture of the summer sunlight on my back and the stone floor and walls inside. The space is big but seems somehow smaller than the one from the representation. The kitchen is not entirely visible either. I look down, there is no checkered pattern left and instead large stone slabs lay on the floor. I see no trace of messes, turned-over pots, or animal fights … That’s when I was suddenly struck by the major difference. It was a difference not in what was there, but in what was lacking. There were no animals inside and not a single sign of a fight or the mess it caused. No one was trying to end the dispute or looking at the fire that wasn’t there as well, and no children were playing up the stairs that had, in the meantime, been separated by a wall. Everything was motionless, lifeless, mute …

I walk further into this hollow space and see the arcs up ahead. They frame a scene that comes to life in my imagination bit by bit. However, in the space itself, everything comes to you at once: the cold, the silence, the vast yet confined space. Everything comes bundled, entangled.

The engraving is different; it seems to depict a fraction of frozen time. Yet the moment seems far too perfect and calculated. The sounds resonate in my ears in waves: the hissing of a cat (hssss) and growling of a dog (grrr), the pots crashing (thud) and their contents spilling (rattle, rattle, rattle), and the people trying to end this fighting (shht, Eh!). There is more: the fire crackling (crack, crack), something boiling (plop, plop, plop), hurried steps up the stairs (tack, tack, tack), and the laughter of children. I can imagine that, just as I did, these people felt both the warmth of the fire and the cold from the stone. Something is being cooked. I hear stomachs growling. However, there isn’t much preparation going on, and the kitchen seems strangely naked. Are they preparing the meal much earlier than it will be served? Many questions come to mind.

The engraving enlarges my interpretation of the space and vice-versa. Standing in the palace, I am confronted with the silence and stillness of the scene that is no longer at play yet still lingers in my memory. The kitchen changes and is now full of things that are familiar to my everyday life. Time has moved on, and the kitchen has done the same. The space is now interwoven with the history of what it once was and the reality of what it now is, neither vision taking up the space of the other. On the contrary, both coexist, drawing on each other, engaging with and conveying meaning to whoever steps foot in this kitchen. A kitchen that is neither what it was nor what it is, but that is felt as a strange and somewhat comforting mixture of both.

Joel: The first thing I feel when I close my eyes is the space, and even if the image has movement and people, I find myself in an empty space. The space is huge, and I can hear the echo of my footsteps. It’s raining outside; I can listen to it as well. The building is huge and has plenty of light that comes in, not only from the windows in front of me (in the lithography) but also from some windows behind me. The house must be turned east since it’s morning, and the light is coming from my back, allowing me to see everything perfectly.

[…] Suddenly, the picture changed, and some firewood could be broken easily after I touched them. The wood was no longer wet; the sound reveals that, and the dew smell I felt before had also disappeared. This firewood will be used to make stew in the cauldron. Yes, I imagine a stew in the pot.

Finally, I introduce people to my thoughts without exploring the first floor. Oddly, the room becomes hotter. The fire is burning. I can hear the firewood crackling, and the smoke is impossible not to feel. The smoke is so dense, invading the building, that my clothes smell like it. It is disgusting. I feel uncomfortable. I always feel awkward when my clothes get smelly. […] it smells of stew now. I can feel it. It is even hotter now, and although I do not see it, the older man must be sweating. I do not recognize the smell, but it gives me a sense of well-being. I want to be where I am right now.

I turn my attention to the rest of the people in the kitchen. It is extraordinary what I am seeing. A dog and a cat are fighting, barking, and meowing very loudly. I hear the children as well. They laugh very loudly while they run and shout at each other. I do not understand their game; maybe they are just running to see who is the first to get to the top of the stairs, although this last supposition is probably my head remembering old games I played. Why do the two adults, a man, a woman, and the older man, look relaxed? Maybe they are just used to this confusion; it is a normal day.

Discussion

The purpose of this paper was to have an experience that allowed us ‘to think about the ways in which landscapes and built forms were experienced, perceived, and represented by ancient subjects’ (Van Dyke and Alcock 2003, 7) and to open a window into the past using an interpretative process. Although it was indeed possible to apply the methods developed by phenomenologists in our case study, what we did was go further and demonstrate that we can use our senses to study many different types of sites and not just landscapes, and from several chronologies, not just from the distant past. Furthermore, we can expand our analysis and deepen our studies by stimulating our senses with images and texts. The result of our investigation could never have been achieved without the combination of both methods, and the inclusion of graphical representations in the analysis produced a significant difference.

The three of us experienced this differently. The first experience involved physically entering the palace, with one participant possessing extensive knowledge of eighteenth-century palatial buildings and the other lacking such knowledge. The differences in our experiences highlighted the influence of prior knowledge on perceptual expectations. Tânia’s account exemplifies how prior knowledge influences the interpretation of visual stimuli, allowing her to vividly reconstruct sensory elements even in a refurbished twenty-first-century setting. Inês, lacking preconceptions, experienced a dissonance between the static image and her imagination, highlighting the challenge of recreating sensory dimensions without historical context. In the case where only the representation was used, we could see the practical implications of what was already scientifically known, the use of only one sense – in this case, sight – and how it activated parts of our brain usually triggered by other senses such as smell, touch, and hearing. The account revealed the dynamic interplay between visual stimuli and the activation of other sensory memories. Joel’s experience portrayed a shift from an empty visual space to a vivid sensory environment, underscoring the capacity of visual stimuli to trigger multi-sensory memories.

In the case of Joel’s experience, different memories and senses were triggered by the visual. However, the ones entering the palace experienced other senses, such as touch and hearing. We touched the walls, climbed stairs, and physically interacted with the remaining architectural features. This tactile engagement elicited a sense of materiality and connection with the historical setting beyond visual observation. We also employed our hearing, we heard our steps, the wind outside, and the children playing outside. Although our shoes are made differently, and there were changes in the direction of the wind, all this helped us engage with the setting. However, even then, the experience was a synaesthetic one; no stew was being made, yet the memory of the representation in our head brought the smell of carrots, turnips, cabbage, and lamb to the scene. The discrepancies that each of us felt and the interpretations each of us created reflect the subjective nature of reconstructing historical experiences.

Historical interpretation is a dynamic process. The experiences evolved as we engaged with the historical representation or physical space, emphasizing that understanding the past is not a fixed or static endeavour. This dynamic nature shows us the importance of considering multiple perspectives and the fluidity of historical interpretation. All of us not only visualized but also heard, smelled, and felt aspects of the past. This interconnectedness suggests that sensory memories are often woven together, influencing and enhancing one another. The multisensory approach contributes to a more holistic and nuanced understanding of historical spaces, as was already stated before.

The engraving enlarges the interpretation of the palace, giving it movement, people, and life. It transforms the static structure into a dynamic, lived environment. The engraving becomes a storytelling device, allowing us to access and experience a vibrant past even when the physical building no longer stands. Conversely, today’s setting also expands our knowledge of the engraving, giving it depth, expanding it to the sides and the back, positioning it in a larger context, giving us a sense of dimension, and raising questions and sensations that perhaps the representation alone would not have raised.

Our study also reveals that while the specific neural mechanisms of how modern brains adapt to past pictures may not be extensively studied, neuroscience research suggests that memory is a complex process involving multiple sensory inputs. Visual stimuli can trigger memory recall, and the brain often integrates visual, tactile, and acoustic cues to reconstruct past experiences. The experiment aimed to tap into these sensory dimensions to recreate a holistic understanding of the past, acknowledging that multiple senses contribute to memory and perception. By engaging with representations, individuals can reconstruct multisensory elements of past environments, including sounds, smells, textures, and tastes. This challenges the notion that historical understanding is limited to visual aspects alone.

Conclusion

Essentially, we experience what we feel. This concept may be easier to understand for those who have read Marcel Proust’s (Proust 2011) famous remembrance of his childhood memories triggered by biting into a madeleine and drinking tea. Perhaps we have all been like Marcel Proust at least once, transported to the past by a familiar smell, a recognizable face, or an old sound. When we looked at the 1781 picture, our brains were activated to all those activities that our sensorial memory could remember, adding to the knowledge we acquired as researchers. We do this often in our lives. A smell makes us see a landscape, a sound transports us to a particular concert room and we visualize a band playing, or the picture of a chocolate cake activates our taste.

As with most archaeological sites, time has erased most evidence of the original Marquess of Ponte de Lima palace. It is difficult to understand its original internal architecture, along with the sounds, smells, tastes, and touches of all the activities that occurred inside. Still, we tried a traditional phenomenological approach that permitted us to understand how the interior of the palace was perceived. When entering and looking up, when passing through the arches, we experienced how our bodies interacted and felt the building. We all had different perceptions of the palace or felt it differently. The heterogeneity of our combined knowledge revealed that the two of us who made use of our bodies to feel the palace had different perspectives of it, most likely related to past experiences inside such buildings. However, it was quite curious to notice that when confronted with the image, all our brains engaged with similar sensorial memories. We all hear the cat meowing and the dog barking. Cats and dogs make the same sound around the world, but for us, in our Portuguese minds, it was a miauuuuuu and a ão, ão ão, revealing how our mental structures affect the way we perceive the world. The stew smelled like vegetables and meat cooked in olive oil. We know that in the eighteenth century butter was more frequent, but we recognize the scent we remember from our stews, where olive oil is more commonly used. Even when visiting the palace, although we did not have access to some crucial elements that would make that space be understood differently, we were able to locate the kitchen area, but a fire did not burn in the hearth, and so no pot stew was cooking, and no children were running up the stairs. Nonetheless, the combination of this representation, where we can see affects and relations, with our own bodily experiences inside the building helped us understand how people felt inside the palace in the past. The reconstitution of this kitchen would have been impossible without this representation. This is not a matter of giving primacy to sight but, rather, of finding new ways to access all of our five senses. Text and image activate the possibility of using our sensorial experiences to write more nuanced and complex narratives about the past, suggesting that historical spaces are not static entities, but dynamic constructs shaped by evolving interpretations and lived experiences. Prior knowledge does play a part in sensory reconstructions, shedding light on the nuanced interplay between familiarity, visual stimuli, and the richness of sensory recall. However, it is not a necessary condition to access these past synaesthetic landscapes.

After we combined our experiences, we felt that the value of our study had several dimensions. One of the most important outcomes was the interdisciplinary nature of the study, bridging archaeology, phenomenology, and neuroscience through the combination of science, empiricism, and theory. The ability of historical representations to evoke complex sensory memories suggests a potential for enhanced historical engagement. Immersive experiences generated through visual stimuli contributed to a deeper connection with the past, fostering a more profound understanding of historical contexts. Also, the ability to reconstruct sensory experiences through visual stimuli opens avenues for reimagining historical contexts and encouraging a more immersive engagement with the past. This approach may redefine how we perceive and interpret historical representations and sites.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.