Assembling Heads and Circulating Tales: The Doings and Undoings of Specimen 2032

In April 1859, U.S. Army Surgeon Charles Brewer was dispatched to a remote mountain valley in the Utah Territory with orders to oversee the burial of 120 massacre victims. The scattered bones of overland immigrants who had been murdered by Mormon militiamen were gathered and interred in a series of mass graves. Though Brewer reported that his work was complete, he carried away from the site two skulls. One of those crania was recently identified in the collections of the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

The analysis of “Specimen 2032” is presented here, along with the history of movements and encounters that brought it to this place. Rather than focus solely on the object’s authenticity or its linkages to the massacre site, Novak examines it within multiple assemblages — lively gatherings of materials, agents and practices. In moving through these assemblages, the so-called specimen, she argues, is ontologically modified and transformed.

Please join the School of Human Evolution and Social Change for a light lunch at 11:45 a.m., followed by a talk by guest speaker Shannon A. Novak from 12 - 1 p.m. (Please RSVP to reserve your spot.)

About the speaker

Novak is an associate professor of anthropology at Syracuse University. Her research interests focus on historical memory, movement and materiality; violence, gender and the life course (including afterlives); and the ontological in/stability of the body. Trained as a bioarchaeologist and social anthropologist, Novak’s studies integrate diverse material traces with oral traditions and ethnographic observations.