Below are photos taken at the 2007 meeting, New Author Review, in Cedar City, Utah.
Dr. Shannon A. Novak is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
Novak is a biological anthropologist with a special interest in social and political behavior. To reconstruct such behavior in the past, she studies the human body as both a living oganism and a cultural symbol. On the biological side, she focuses on skeletal injury patterns as indicators of social conflict and violence. On the cultural side, she studies how skeletal evidence is used in political arenas to construct social identities and to shape historical narratives.
Novak received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Her dissertation research developed a method for identifying gender violence in thearchaeological record based on the patterning of traumatic lesions on the skeleton.
Since 1990, she has analyzed human skeletal remains from prehistoric, historic, and forensic settings in Jordan, England, Croatia, Guatemala, and the United States.
In recent years Novak's research has focused two infamous events in nineteenth-century America: the ordeal of the Donner Party
(1846-47)and the massacre at Moutain Meadows, Utah (1857). She was drawn into the Mountain Meadows case in 1999 when a mass grave was unearthed at the site. Her analysis of the skeletal remains from the massacre produced a unique scientific record of what happened at Mountain Meadows. The skeletal findings were summarized in ?To Feed a Tree in Zion: Osteological Analysis of the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre,? Historical Archaeology (2003). Her book on the subject, House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, will be published by the University of Utah Press in February 2008.
Meanwhile, Novak has worked with Dr. Lars Rodseth, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Utah, to collect oral histories from descendants of the victims at Mountain Meadows.
Preliminary results of this research have been presented in ?Remembering Mountain Meadows: Collective Violence and the Manipulation of Social Boundaries,? in the Journal of Anthropological Research (Novak and Rodseth 2006).
Selected Publications:
2008
House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. (Reviews)
2007
Patterns of Injuries: Accident or Abuse. Violence Against Women. (with Terry Allen and Lawrence Bench)
2006
Remembering Mountain Meadows: Collective Violence and the Manipulation of Social Boundaries. Journal of Anthropological Research, 62:1-25. (with Lars Rodseth)
2006
Beneath the Facade: A Skeletal Model of Domestic Violence. In the Social Archaeology of Human Remains, edited by Christopher Knusel and Rebecca Gowland, pp. 238-252. Oxbow Press, London.
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. (wiih Derinna Kopp)
2001
Battle Related Trauma. In Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of T owton AD 1461, edited by Veronica Fiorato, Anthea Boylston and Christopher Knusel, pp. 90-102. Oxbow Press, London.
2000
The Social Modes of Men: Toward an Ecological Model of Human Male Relationships. Human Nature 11 (4):335-366. (with Lars Rodseth)
2000
Perimortem Processing of Human Remains among the Great Basin Fremont. International Journal ofOsteoarchaeolqgy 10:65-75. (with Dana Kollmann)
