| 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. |
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| 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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| Shanon A. Novak is assistant professor of anthropology, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. (Click here for more information) BOOK REVIEWS |
| Review Courtesty University of Utah Press |
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| “Shannon Novak shows us the way that bioarchaeology can combine with history to provide a more complete and accurate story of the past—better than either can do by itself. Her researching of the history of the Arkansas emigrants and their roots goes well beyond the efforts of most works of this kind.” |
| — George W. Gill, PhD, professor emeritus of anthropology, University of Wyoming |
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