- 209 Maxwell Hall
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244-1090
Shannon Novak
Syracuse University, Anthropology, Faculty Member
- Ethnohistory, Bioarchaeology, Political Violence, Embodiment, Materiality (Anthropology), North American West, and 20 moreGender Archaeology, History of New York City, Social Theory, Gender And Violence, Forensic Anthropology, Antebellum South, Skeletal Trauma Analysis, Anthropology, Violence, Osteology, Collective Memory, Trauma, Funerary Archaeology, STS (Anthropology), American West, Mortuary archaeology, Memory and materiality, Anthropology of Religion, Indentured Labours Guyana, and Multispecies Ethnographyedit
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Archaeological bodies and their afflictions have multiplied in recent years, along with the specialists who study them. The result is a cascade of data, much of it difficult to reconcile. I argue that variable enactments of disease,... more
Archaeological bodies and their afflictions have multiplied in recent years, along with the specialists who study them. The result is a cascade of data, much of it difficult to reconcile. I argue that variable enactments of disease, rather than reflecting an epistemological disconnect or difference in scale, engender ontological gaps. To pursue these malleable matters, I trace the proliferation of "cancer" from the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (1820-1850) in Manhattan. To explore the struggles involved in making many things one, I consider emergent multiplicities of this "disease" within specialists' laboratories, archival records, and the writing process. Rather than force these different cancers to cohere, or make one "win" based on disciplinary domain (science/humanities) or hierarchy of substance (bone/paper), I rely on Stengers's (2018) ecology of partial connects. The outcome is not a rubric of knowledge gained, but a sketchbook of lessons learned with bodies multiple along the way.
This article seeks to expose the " fallacies of synchrony " that often accompany the analysis of human remains. In approaching a cemetery, for example, we all too easily think of the bodies there as a " community, " even when they belong... more
This article seeks to expose the " fallacies of synchrony " that often accompany the analysis of human remains. In approaching a cemetery, for example, we all too easily think of the bodies there as a " community, " even when they belong to different generations or geographic contexts. This simple point has major implications, especially for the bioarchaeology of urban landscapes. Here, chronologically disparate elements accumulate in vast m ´ elanges, offering innumerable examples of the " non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous, " an idea developed
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The site of Tintal is located to the southeast of El Mirador. These two sites are linked through a causeway measuring 20 km long. Both sites have monumental architecture dating from the Late Preclassic period. The 2004 season completed... more
The site of Tintal is located to the southeast of El Mirador. These two sites are linked through a causeway measuring 20 km long. Both sites have monumental architecture dating from the Late Preclassic period. The 2004 season completed the preliminary mapping of the site and the recording of looter’s trenches as well as the rescue excavations due to the looting at this site. What is surprising about the settlement pattern is that the civic center is completely surrounded by an artificial moat, like that built in the Preclassic site of Becan, Campeche. The sheer size of the structures indicates that Tintal was one of the major sites in the Mirador Basin and the connection by causeways to other large sites in the basin gives us a pattern of the development of the Preclassic state, as well as evidence of occupation during the Early and Late Classic periods.
One of the excavations carried out mentions the discovery of a high-ranking tomb dated to the Early Classic, located at the foot of Tintal’s Stela 1. The tomb and the stela were located in a low mound constructed at the north-east corner of a Large Preclassic structure built in the form of the triadic complex. The tomb shows evidence of a warrior from the Kan reign with possible war trophies, which would suggest the conditions of the area after the Preclassic collapse.
One of the excavations carried out mentions the discovery of a high-ranking tomb dated to the Early Classic, located at the foot of Tintal’s Stela 1. The tomb and the stela were located in a low mound constructed at the north-east corner of a Large Preclassic structure built in the form of the triadic complex. The tomb shows evidence of a warrior from the Kan reign with possible war trophies, which would suggest the conditions of the area after the Preclassic collapse.
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Research Interests: Biomedical Engineering, Spine, Osseointegration, Medicine, Bone graft, and 15 moreSheep, Female, Animals, Behavioral Animal Models, Clinical Sciences, Ilium, Bone Marrow Transplantation, Bone Substitutes, Spinal Fusion, lumbar vertebrae, Bone screws, Bone Transplantation, lumbar, Internal fixators, and Collagen type I
On September 11, 1857, some 120 men, women, and children from the Arkansas hills were murdered in the remote desert valley of Mountain Meadows, Utah. This notorious massacre was, in fact, a mass execution: having surrendered their... more
On September 11, 1857, some 120 men, women, and children from the Arkansas hills were murdered in the remote desert valley of Mountain Meadows, Utah. This notorious massacre was, in fact, a mass execution: having surrendered their weapons, the victims were bludgeoned to death or shot at point-blank range. The perpetrators were local Mormon militiamen whose motives have been fiercely debated for 150 years.In "House of Mourning," Shannon A. Novak goes beyond the question of motive to the question of loss. Who were the victims at Mountain Meadows? How had they settled and raised their families in the American South, and why were they moving west once again? What were they hoping to find or make for themselves at the end of the trail? By integrating archival records and oral histories with the first analysis of skeletal remains from the massacre site, Novak offers a detailed and sensitive portrait of the victims as individuals, family members, cultural beings, and living bodies.The history of the massacre has often been treated as a morality tale whose chief purpose was to vilify (or to glorify) some collective body. Resisting this tendency to oversimplify the past, Novak explores Mountain Meadows as a busy and dangerous intersection of cultural and material forces in antebellum America. "House of Mourning "is a bold experiment in a new kind of history, the biocultural analysis of complex events."
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In this paper we contextualize two unique individuals recovered from the historic Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults in lower Manhattan (ca. 1820-1846). The crania of one adolescent and one infant display clear evidence of a... more
In this paper we contextualize two unique individuals recovered from the historic Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults in lower Manhattan (ca. 1820-1846). The crania of one adolescent and one infant display clear evidence of a craniotomy. Both had complete circumferential incisions to remove the calvarium for internal examination. Both crania were sectioned using a saw, though the adolescent underwent further postmortem preparation: thin scalpel marks indicate defleshing, and metal pins embedded in the frontal and occipital bones would have facilitated disarticulation and rearticulation of the vault, presumably for teaching. By the early 19th century, the illicit exhumation of graves to obtain cadavers for anatomical dissection was a widespread phenomenon and particularly prevalent in New York City. Though the bodies of criminals, the destitute, and the marginalized were often targeted, resurrectionists were opportunistic in their pursuits. Thus, the presence of two disse...
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This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Anthropology at Digital Commons at Buffalo State. It has been accepted for inclusion in Northeast Historical Archaeology by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons at... more
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Anthropology at Digital Commons at Buffalo State. It has been accepted for inclusion in Northeast Historical Archaeology by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons at Buffalo State. For more information, please contact
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Human social organization is in part a recombination of three African ape patterns: a gorilla-like sexual bond, a chimpanzee-like bond among males, and a bonobo-like band among females. However, the human bond, even if patrilocal, is... more
Human social organization is in part a recombination of three African ape patterns: a gorilla-like sexual bond, a chimpanzee-like bond among males, and a bonobo-like band among females. However, the human bond, even if patrilocal, is never merely a male kinship network to which females are attached through sexual bonds. Women's sociality is more elaborate than any other female hominoid's, with the possible exception of bonobos, and the local community is always a "high-density network" constituted by multiple overlapping alliances between women as well as between men and between sexual partners. The nesting of pair bonds within communities usually goes beyond a two-level hierarchy of bonds and bands, with descent groups, sodalities, religious cults, and other groupings uniting members of different families within the same community. Relationships between communities, furthermore, are uniquely elaborated in human societies.
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The concept of social memory has generated a large literature, much of which focuses on the trauma of collective violence. Yet we need to know more about how narratives of violent and traumatic events influence social loyalties and how... more
The concept of social memory has generated a large literature, much of which focuses on the trauma of collective violence. Yet we need to know more about how narratives of violent and traumatic events influence social loyalties and how such narratives are managed or manipulated. Here we focus on the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre, in which some 120 Arkansas emigrants were murdered in southwestern Utah. Our aim is not to establish "what really happened" at Mountain Meadows, but to examine the memory politics of the case-the many stories of the massacre, the ways they have been told, and their use as reference points in drawing or redrawing social boundaries. Our analysis highlights the activities of schoolteachers and other rural intellectuals in shaping the trauma process. This process, we argue, is based on an expanding sense of victimization as communicated in narratives of social violence and suffering.
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Here we attempt to define a specifically human ecology within which male reproductive strategies are formulated. By treating the domestic and public spheres of social life as "ecological niches" that men have been forced to compete within... more
Here we attempt to define a specifically human ecology within which male reproductive strategies are formulated. By treating the domestic and public spheres of social life as "ecological niches" that men have been forced to compete within or to avoid as best they can, we generate a typology of four "social modes" of human male behavior. We then attempt to explain the broad distribution of social modes within and between human groups based on the relative intensity of scramble and contest competition.
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Violence against women is a worldwide phenomenon, but it varies in both frequency and severity from one population to another (Counts et al. 1999; Garcia-Moreno et al. 2006). In a few small-scale societies, such as the Wape of Papua New... more
Violence against women is a worldwide phenomenon, but it varies in both frequency and severity from one population to another (Counts et al. 1999; Garcia-Moreno et al. 2006). In a few small-scale societies, such as the Wape of Papua New Guinea (Mitchell 1999), gender violence of any kind is reported to be extremely rare. In many other settings, however, women are frequently subjected to physical harm, including abuse by their in-laws or their own natal kin (Brown 1997; Gruenbaum 2001; Sen 2001). Intimate partner violence, especially wife-beating, may be socially condoned and even commended (e.g., Abraham 2000; McClusky 2001). Despite this variation, gender violence seems to be quite uniform in at least one respect. Most of its victims are fertile females-not girls and not grandmothers, but women of childbearing age. The pattern is evident in every region of the world, but a clinical study in Bradford, England provides one vivid illustration (Novak 1999, 2006). In a sample of 673 women who had been admitted to the Bradford Royal Infirmary over a 12-month period, victims of domestic assault were compared with patients who had suffered other kinds of injuries. The mean age of the assault victims was 30, and almost 90% of them were younger than 40. Accident patients, by contrast, had a mean age of 36 and many of them (36%) were 40 or older. Taking the sample as a whole, we see that women younger than 20 and those older than 40 were similar in that their greatest risk of injury came from accidents rather than assaults. Between 20 and 40, however, accident cases were far outnumbered by cases of domestic violence. These data suggest that a woman's risk of being