Shannon A. Novak
Associate Professor, Anthropology
Degree
Ph.D., University of Utah, 1999
Specialties
Bioarchaeology, ethnohistory, gender, political violence, materiality of the body, North America
Courses
Anthropology 131: Introduction to Biological
Anthropology
Anthropology 400/600: Seminar—Materiality
Anthropology 400/600: Seminar—Reading the Body
Anthropology 433/633: Human Osteology
Anthropology 434/634: Anthropology of Death
Anthropology 436/636: Bioarchaeology
Anthropology 631: Method and Theory in
Biological Anthropology
Biography
As a
biocultural anthropologist, I seek to understand human bodies as both living
organisms and cultural symbols. More specifically, my research interests include
political and gender violence; historical memory, movement, and materiality;
and the ontological instability of the body. I’ve explored these interests most
fully in studies of two infamous events in nineteenth-century America: the
Mountain Meadows massacre and the ordeal of the Donner Party.
My first book, House of Mourning: A
Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (2008), examines the
murder of some 120 men, women, and children in 1857 by a local militia in the
Utah Territory. My analysis of skeletal remains from the massacre site is integrated
with archival records and oral histories to offer a portrait of the victims as
individuals, family members, cultural beings, and living bodies. Having
completed a decade of ethnographic and ethnohistoric research in both Utah and
Arkansas, my attention turned to the living and how the victims’ bodies and
biographies have been deployed in cultural politics over some 150 years.
My second book,
An Archaeology of Desperation (2011),
is a co-edited volume that synthesizes the findings from excavations at the
Donner family encampment in the Sierra Nevada. Here, a contingent of overland
emigrants became snowbound during the winter of 1846-47 and had to resort to
cannibalism to survive. In this book, specialists weave together lines of
evidence from archaeology, history, ecology, and osteology to reflect on human
social behavior under extreme conditions. Both books received the James Deetz
Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology.
My most recent project explores a different kind of American frontier, that of
an urbanizing metropolis. Along with my students, I completed the analysis of some
200 individuals from burial vaults associated with the Spring Street
Presbyterian Church in Lower Manhattan (ca. 1820-1850). The church housed a
multi-racial congregation of radical abolitionists, whose controversial
practices became the focus of race riots in 1834. The remains of people interred
there provide a fascinating view of a community who gathered in response to
dramatic social, economic, and ecological changes brought on by commercialization
and early industrialization. Archival records and family histories are being
used to complement the skeletal findings and to provide insights on migration,
disease, labor, and social identities in this diverse group. Stable isotope
analyses are being conducted by my colleagues, Dr. Joan Coltrain and Dr. Diego
Fernandez at the University of Utah, and together we recently initiated a
geomapping project using faunal remains from archaeological sites in New York
City and surrounding areas.
Publications
BOOKS
2008 House
of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City
2011 An
Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party's Alder Creek Camp,
edited by Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M. Schablistsky, and Shannon A. Novak.
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman
SELECT ARTICLES
& CHAPTERS
(forthcoming) Talking Heads and Other Specters of the
Mountain Meadows Massacre. In Studies in Forensic Biohistory:
Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Christopher Stowjanowski and
William N. Duncan. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
(in press) On The Stories of Men and the Substance of
Women: Interrogating Gender Through Violence. In Exploring Sex and
Gender in Bioarchaeology, edited by Sarbina C. Agarwal and Julie K.
Wesp. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque
2016 Partible
Persons or Persons Apart: Postmortem Interventions at the Spring Street
Presbyterian Church, Manhattan. In The Bioarchaeology of Dissection
and Autopsy in the United States, edited by Ken Nystrom. University
Press of Florida, Gainesville
2014
Leave Taking: Materialities of Moving Over Land. Cambridge
Archaeological Journal 24(3):1-9
2014 How
to Say Things with Bodies: Meaningful Violence on an American
Frontier. In The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Human
Conflict, edited by Christopher Knüsel and Martin J. Smith, pp. 542-559.
New York: Routledge
2011
[Wo]man and Beast: Skeletal Signatures of a Starvation Diet. In An
Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party's Alder Creek Camp,
edited by Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M. Schablitsky, and Shannon A. Novak, pp.
185-218. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman
2011 The
Signature of Starvation: A Comparison of Bone Processing at a Chinese
Encampment in Montana and the Donner Party Camp in California. Historical
Archaeology 45(2):97-112. (with Meredith A. B. Ellis, Christopher W.
Merritt, and Kelly J. Dixon)
2010
“Men, Women, and Children Starving”: Archaeology of the Donner Family Camp. American
Antiquity 75(3):627-656. (with Kelly J. Dixon, Gwen Robbins, Julie M.
Schablitsky, G. Richard Scott, and Guy L. Tasa)
2010
Resurrectionists' Excursions: Evidence of Postmortem Dissection from the Spring
Street Presbyterian Church. Northeast Historical Archaeology,
Volume 39:134-152. (with Wesley Willoughby)
2010
Archaeologies of Disease and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century New York: The
View from Spring Street. Northeast Historical Archaeology, Volume
39: 86-108. (with William Werner)
2009 The
Political Significance of Gender Violence. In Sexual Coercion in Primates
and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression Against Females,
edited by Martin N. Muller and Richard W. Wrangham, pp. 292-321. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press. (with Lars Rodseth)
2009
[2006] Beneath the Façade: A Skeletal Model of Domestic Violence. In The
Social Archaeology of Human Remains, edited by Rebecca Gowland and
Christopher Knüsel, pp. 238-252, second edition. Oxbow Press, Oxford
2007
[2001] Battle Related Trauma. In Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a
Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton AD 1461, second revised edition,
edited by Veronica Fiorato, Anthea Boylston and Christopher Knüsel, pp. 90-102.
Oxbow Press, Oxford
2006
Remembering Mountain Meadows: Collective Violence and the Manipulation of
Social Boundaries. Journal of Anthropological Research, 62:1-25. (with
Lars Rodseth)
2006 The
Impact of Primatology on the Study of Human Society. In Missing the
Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists, edited by Jerome H. Barkow,
pp. 187-220. Oxford University Press, New York. (with Lars Rodseth)
2003 To
Feed a Tree in Zion: Osteological Analysis of the 1857 Mountain Meadows
Massacre. Historical Archaeology 37(2):85-108. (with Derinna Kopp)
Research Grants and Awards
2015 Excellence in Graduate
Education Faculty Recognition Award, Syracuse University
2013 Society for Historical
Archaeology James Deetz Award for: An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring
the Donner Party's Alder Creek Camp (2011, University of Oklahoma Press)
2010 Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Award for Outstanding Research, Teaching, and Service. Maxwell School,
Syracuse University
2010 Society for Historical Archaeology
James Deetz Award for: House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the
Mountain Meadows Massacre (2008, University of Utah Press)