This week, scientists published the first chemical analysis of ritual ash at Pompeii, reconstructing the smell of ancient incense from a city frozen at its moment of collapse. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the New Museum reopened after an $82 million renovation with a show called 'New Humans: Memories of the Future,' framing our current moment as something future archaeologists will need to decode. The juxtaposition is hard to ignore: one project reconstructs the sensory texture of a dead civilization; the other asks whether ours is already in the process of becoming one.
Sensory Archaeology and What Gets Preserved
The Pompeii incense study is methodologically remarkable because it moves beyond the visual, which is what almost all art history privileges. Ritual ash, not frescoes, not mosaics. The researchers essentially forensic-audited a spiritual practice. This connects to a broader shift in how institutions think about heritage. The Brooklyn Museum's new Africa collection space is explicitly designed to connect Egypt and North Africa to the rest of the continent, a rebuke to centuries of siloed, visually-dominant curation that stripped objects of their olfactory, sonic, and ritual context. Preservation has always been political. What you choose to smell is a curatorial argument.
Post-Human Museums and the Civilization Self-Portrait
The New Museum show lands differently in 2026 than it might have in a quieter year. With the Iran war reshaping geopolitics and diagnostic thinking under pressure in medicine and governance alike, the show's premise, that technology and humanity are at war, feels less like speculation and more like journalism. The Pompeii researchers are doing something the New Museum show gestures toward: using materiality to reconstruct interiority. What did those Romans want from their gods? The ash tells you more than the statuary. Future archaeologists might say the same about our data exhaust. As Max Hollein has argued in conversation with Culture Slop, museums in the digital age are fundamentally about what we choose to make legible. The Pompeii ash is a legibility problem. So is the post-human condition.