“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.[...]
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