Roman geometric mosaic floor, from Conimbriga, Portugal. Image by Carole Raddato.
“I don’t think material culture has anything for you,” said a senior scholar to me, a blind student in my first semester of a Master’s program. “You’d be better off sticking to texts.” The comment was offered in response to my request for a letter of recommendation for an archaeological grant regularly awarded to students at the institution and, while certainly not offered in malice, this feedback constricted my scholarly imagination—my sense of what questions and methods I could pursue—for years.
It was at another institution and with much more sanguine faculty mentors that I began engaging critically with material culture of the Ancient Mediterranean world. This process, full of fits and starts, grandiose plans and often simple solutions, played out over the five years of my doctoral program and, eventually, culminated in a kind of scholarly independence reminiscent of the freedom won when first learning to navigate my environment with a white cane, the simple, elegant graphite or plastic stick many blind and low-vision people use when walking to feel and hear their way through the world.
Becoming blind in high school meant several years of trial and error around what means were best suited for my personal, academic, and professional independence. In high school it meant admitting that a white cane would indeed open up the world to me in ways my insecure, adolescent self did not want to confess. In college it meant learning (then relearning) Greek: first through tediously slow text-to-speech programs that would read each word at this pain-staking pace: “Greek small letter lambda, Greek small letter omicron with acute accent, Greek small letter gamma, Greek small letter omicron, Greek small letter final sigma.” Then, through the help of fellow blind scholars of Antiquity discovered by a Hail Mary Google search, I learned the braille system for Ancient Greek, allowing for a comparatively blazing speed through grammars and primary texts made available through all kinds of open access initiatives. The success with Ancient Greek braille drove me to learn similar scripts for Hebrew and Aramaic. After benefiting from these already developed systems, I, along with Sarah Blake LaRose, developed a braille system for Coptic, opening up a whole corpus of Ancient texts to braille-reading students of the Ancient world.
When it came to material culture, I faced another set of accessibility-related roadblocks. I had come to internalize the perspective from the opening of this essay: material culture constituted an evidentiary corpus for which vision was a precondition for insightful analysis. Such an opinion has an ancient pedigree. Plato, Galen, and the author of Luke-Acts all seem quite comfortable associating blindness with ignorance; it is a bodily difference and a loaded cultural signifier.[1] To lack sightedness is, often enough, to fail to understand—here the linguistic slippage between the Greek eidon (I saw) and oida (I understand) illustrates a point made explicit elsewhere.
It was the kind and persistent encouragement of others, including Steven Friesen and Geoffrey Smith, that challenged me to reimagine how I might engage productively with material culture. Particularly useful were the methods we adopted for engaging with ancient manuscripts and archaeological site plans. Ancient papyri and parchment are not the kinds of things curators hand out for tactile examination. Plated in glass and (ideally) preserved in strict conditions, these materials are typically observed by the naked eye or by means of microscopes and other visually-based technologies. To engage with these objects, we took high-resolution images of a text like P.Oxy 5072, enlarged the image, and printed it upon paper that, when exposed to heat, raises the ink to produce a tactile image. This technology (about as advanced as an Easy-Bake Oven) is often used to produce graphs in high school math textbooks for blind and low vision students. With some modifications, we created a system for printing the ink traces of manuscripts and cutting around the borders of the document so as to mirror the shape and basic dimensions of its ancient facsimile.
Similar strategies proved effective for creating site plans of ancient cities, temples, and regions from the Ancient Mediterranean. We often modified these to simplify various lines (e.g., lines designating non-essential information about modern roads, etc.). We also found that for certain plans we could start by printing basic information about a temple, like its exterior walls, then add in additional lines while discussing their purpose within the site. These could be added by whatever we had handy, including electrical tape, dots of Elmer’s glue, and stickers you might find on a child’s chore chart. The key to producing these plans is simplicity and repetition. Some plans, like first-century Ephesos, required expansive, poster-sized maps highlighting different features in each. From early coursework to the final semester of writing and all the teaching in between, interactions with material culture became a vital part of my scholarly development.
In the undergraduate classroom, these experiences inform and enrich my own pedagogical practice irrespective of whether students use their eyes to engage with the material. Tactile manuscripts, I have found, provide students with vivid examples of how scribal practices—themselves haptic and embodied—can be felt. Ancient flourishes of the stylist testify to scribal hands, from which we can imagine important possibilities about the time of copying and the cost of scribal production. Tracing trade routes and city walls focuses students’ attention to the ways the material world affects how humans live within it as students themselves use their fingers to engage with textured maps of ancient landscapes. Employing a broader set of sensory experiences not only makes a “reasonable accommodation,” in the terms of the Americans with Disabilities Act, to the students requiring it; such a practice disrupts our standard scholarly modus operandi and facilitates more expansive questions about the ancient world.
Material culture does not offer a grove of greener grass where data speaks without mediation. Rather, as Maia Kotrosits has recently argued, the purported “realness” of material objects is itself the product of ideological and psychological work.[2] In this sense, my own experiments with materiality in my research and teaching are undoubtedly tangled up in attempts to attain more completely the kind of mastery and control upheld by our disciplines as the telos of scholarly formation. Yet also, I think, material culture and my own meandering path toward it represents an opportunity to think otherwise about what materiality offers students of the ancient world, about what counts as “material culture” in the first place, and about who can contribute to its study.
Daniel Charles Smith is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Classics at Whitman College. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022 from the Department of Religious Studies. His research considers the material and ideological formations of power at the intersection of religion and empire, exploring how Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire leverage constructions of social and embodied difference to establish and maintain their authority. He can be reached at smithdc@whitman.edu.
[1] See, for example, Plato, Republic 518C; Galen, De Usu Partium X.2.66; Meghan R. Henning, “Metaphorical, Punitive, and Pedagogical Blindness in Hell,” in Health, Medicine, and Christianity in Late Antiquity, Jared Secord, Heidi MarxWolf, and Christoph Markschies, eds. (Luven: Peters, 2017), 139-52. On Blindness in Luke-Acts, see Luke 18:31-45; Acts 28:23-29.
[2] Maia Kotrosits, The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and The Real in the History of Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 2.