Books
Ellis, Meredith A.B.
2014 A Disciplined Childhood: A Social Bioarchaeology of the Subadults of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. In Tracing Childhood: Bioarchaeological Investigations of Early Lives in Antiquity, edited by Jennifer L. Thompson, Marta P. Alfonso-Durruty, and John J. Crandall. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
2019 The Children of Spring Street: The Bioarchaeology of Childhood in a 19th Century Abolitionist Congregation. Springer Press, New York, NY.
Novak, Shannon A.
2017 Partible Persons or Persons Apart: Postmortem Interventions at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church, Manhattan. In Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy in the United States, edited by Kenneth C. Nystrom. Springer Press, New York, NY.
Papers
Ellis, Meredith
2010 The Children of Spring Street: Rickets in an Early Nineteenth Century Urban Congregation. Northeast Historical Archaeology 39:120-133.
View Abstract
This paper examines the prevalence of rickets, or vitamin D deficiency, in the subadult skeletal remains from the burial vaults of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church of New York City. The burial vaults of the church were active from approximately 1820–1846 and contain the remains of at least 86 subadults (minimum number of individuals count [MNI] of left tibiae). Over 34% of the subadult tibiae in this collection display pathology consistent with vitamin D deficiency. Since vitamin D is acquired through access to sunlight and specific foods, a high rate of rickets can give clues about living conditions, parenting strategies, and children’s behavior in this population. The urbanizing landscape of early 19th-century New York City and the associated cultural changes make this an interesting case study for exploring the relationship between biology and the environment in children’s lives.
2016. Presence and Absence: An Exploration of Scurvy in the Commingled Subadults in the Spring Street Presbyterian Church Collection, Lower Manhattan. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. 26: 759–766
2020 Still Life: A Bioarchaeological Portrait of Perinatal Remains Buried at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. Historical Archaeology, 54:184-201.
Hosek, Lauren, Alanna L. Warner-Smith, and Cristina Watson
2020 The Body Politic and the Citizen’s Mouth: Oral Health and Dental Care in Nineteenth Century Manhattan. Historical Archaeology, 54:138-159.
Novak, Shannon A.
2017 Corporeal Congregations and Asynchronous Lives: Unpacking the Pews at Spring Street. American anthropologist 119(2): 236-252.
2022 Sketchbook archaeology: Bodies multiple and the archives they create. Journal of Social Archaeology, 22(2):212-232.
Novak, Shannon A. and Wesley Willoughby
2010 Resurrectionists’ Excursions: Evidence of Postmortem Dissection from the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. Northeast Historical Archaeology 39:134-152.
View Abstract
In this paper we contextualize two unique individuals 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 dissected crania in the burial vaults of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church leads us to question how these remains came to be interred alongside members of the Spring Street congregation. Such an inquiry will require a closer examination of the social-historical context of the church and its members along with the physical evidence from the skeletal remains.
Werner, William and Shannon A. Novak
2010 Archaeologies of Disease and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century New York: The View from Spring and Varick. Northeast Historical Archaeology 39:86-108.
View Abstract
The authors situate evidence of disease among the burial population of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church within evolving attitudes towards public health and civic order in 19th-century Manhattan. Two personal vignettes illustrate how individuals interacted with the physical space of the church’s vicinity at different moments in the history of municipal reform. The first, a 16-year-old girl named Louisa, was virtually absent from the historical record until the recovery and analysis of her skeletal remains from the church burials vaults. Her skeletal biography conveys the cosmopolitan nature of Manhattan social relations in the early 19th century and the complex ways that they interacted with contemporary debates on disease and moral improvement. The second individuals, the author of a Harper’s Magazine articles set at a fire watchtower across the street from the church, experiences a transformed infrastructure of the city by the last quarter of the 19th century. This writer’s impressions reflect coalescing middle-class attitudes towards civic order and their manifestations in the physical framework of the city. This public discourse emerged from a half-century of catastrophes in public health and security often pinned on distinct socioeconomic segments of the urban populace. Contrasting these two individuals’ experiences of life at Spring and Varick streets thus helps outline the trajectory of civic governance over the course of the 19th century and fosters critical awareness of the power of social representation in the emergence of modern authority.
Dissertations
Ellis, Meredith A.B.
2014 The Children of Spring Street: The Remains of Childhood in a Nineteenth Century Abolitionist Congregation. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY.
View Abstract
This dissertation examines the skeletal remains of 75 children interred the burial vaults (1820-1846) of the 19th century Spring Street Presbyterian Church in lower Manhattan. New York City and the 8th Ward neighborhood of the church were rapidly urbanizing and diversifying in the early 19th century. These changes affected how children lived and grew. Family life, institutional involvement, and the city itself are considered as structuring forces that helped shape the skeletal remains of the children that did not survive. This dissertation combines historical data, theoretical models of embodiment and agency, and skeletal data to reconstruct their experiences of growing up in a rapidly changing cityscape. In particular, trends in health, diet, and trauma are noted. These trends are established first for sub-groupings of children based on cultural defined age stages, and then combined to examine the life course. This project is therefore a theoretical microhistory of childhood, a novel approach to discussing the bodies of children in the past.
Conference Papers
Ellis, Meredith A.B.
2009 The Children of Spring Street: Subadult Health, Disease, and Death in a Nineteenth Century Congregation. Paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology’s 42nd Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Toronto, Canada.
2011 A Disciplined Childhood: A Social Bioarchaeology of the Subadults of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. Paper presented at the 110th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada.
Also presented at the 2012 Bioarchaeologists’ Northeast Regional Dialogue Conference, Albany, NY.
2012 Person, Place, and Thing: Disassociations of the Spring Street Burial Vaults. Paper presented at the 111th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA.
2013 Presence and Absence: An Exploration of Scurvy in the Subadults in the Spring Street Presbyterian Church Collection. Paper presented at the 2013 Bioarchaeologists’ Northeast Regional Dialogue, Syracuse, NY.
2014 The Text and the Body: The Case of the Reverend Henry G. Ludlow and the Remains of the Congregants of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. Paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology’s 46th Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Quebec City, Canada.
Also presented at the Return of the Text Conference 2013, LeMoyne College, Syracuse, NY.
2014 Louisa Hunter and the Spring Street Presbyterian Church: An Extended Osteobiography of a Teenage Girl. Paper presented at the 2014 Bioarchaeologists’ Northeast Regional Dialogue, Ithaca, NY.
2017 Transfiguring Bodies: The Bioarchaeology of 19th Century Urban Childhood at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. Paper presented at the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth Biennial Conference, Camden, NJ.
Hicks, Katherine E.
2013 An Archaeology of Aesthetics: the Socio-Economic and Ideological Elements of Coffin Plate Selection at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. Paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology’s 46th Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Leicester, England.
View Abstract
Material shifts among decorative coffin fittings reflect how past populations conceptualized death, memory, and social status. Coffin plates recovered during the excavation of four burial vaults (ca. 1820-1843) associated with the Spring Street Presbyterian Church, New York City, were simple and uniform in design, inscribed only with the names, ages, and death dates of the individuals with whom they were interred. This paper examines the socio-economic and ideological elements that may have contributed to the selection of simply designed coffin fittings among the Spring Street congregation, in contrast to elaborate coffin fittings recovered from comparative mortuary sites in the United States and England, and the developing garden cemetery movement of the mid-nineteenth century.
2016 Using GIS to Investigate Mortuary Practice and Identity at the Historic Spring Street Presbyterian Church, Manhattan. Paper presented at the Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, Florida.
View Abstract
This paper focuses on the use of a geographical information system (GIS) as a tool to identify the distribution and association of mortuary artifacts and skeletal remains within the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (ca.1820–1846). The GIS study presented here is one component of a microhistorical approach to exploring a 19th century neighborhood in New York City’s 8th Ward during a period of rapidly changing urban, social, and economic landscapes. Viewing the city through the lens of this radical abolitionist church congregation provides an avenue of inquiry that considers these changing landscapes with regard to the social, religious, and mortuary ideologies espoused by the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. By spatially reconstructing the Spring Street burial vaults, this GIS assists in the identification of patterns associated with the demographics of the interred congregants, both in the distribution of the interments and artifacts within the vaults, as well as how those spatial relationships reflect identity and mortuary custom as practiced by the Spring Street congregation.
Hosek, Lauren, and Alanna Warner
2015 “The ‘Most Unruly Orifice’: 19th Century Mouths in New York City.” FPP History Graduate Student Conference. March 20, 2015.
Novak, Shannon.
2017 “Corporeal Congregations and Asynchronous Lives.” Invited symposium: Bodies as Narratives: Revisiting Osteobiography as a Conceptual Tool. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Vancouver, BC.
2016 “Corporeal Congregations and Asynchronous Lives: Unpacking the Pews at Spring Street.” Anthropology Department Speaker Series, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, November 22.
2016 “Unpacking the Pews at Spring Street.” Archaeology and Futurity Conference. Brown University, Providence, RI. April 14-16.
Novak, Shannon and Meredith Ellis
2014 Extensions and Articulations: The “Generation Problem” in Jacksonian Manhattan. Paper presented at the 113th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington D.C.
Warner, Alanna and Lauren Hosek
2014 The Body as Assemblage: The Mouth and Dental Prostheses in 19th Century New York City. Paper presented at the 2014 Bioarchaeologists’ Northeast Regional Dialogue, Ithaca, NY.
View Abstract
Bodies are not closed systems, but rather dynamic and permeable social entities composed of multiple materials and temporalities. As Ingold notes, bodies are “flow(s) of materials comprising corporeal life” (2011:16). Expressions of identity and formations of personhood are relational, generated and distributed through social interactions and material things. While this sense of relational, extended personhood is well attended to in prehistoric archaeology, historical archaeologists have engaged less with theories of personhood and tend to rely more on modern Western notions of bounded individuals and bodies (Wilkinson 2013; Fowler 2010). In this paper, we examine 19th century dental prostheses—a stone tooth, a gold bridge, and gold fillings—found with commingled skeletal remains in the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (ca. 1820-1846) in New York City. An analysis of these prostheses demonstrates how objects and substances are incorporated into bodies, becoming part of the overlapping processes and temporalities that make up corporeal life. The mouth is an especially active social interface where materials with biological and geological histories of their own intersect with experiences, habits, and practices. We examine the microscale entanglements of class, gender, medical practices, and ideologies of morality and aesthetics in the dynamic social landscape of 19th century New York City. Finally, we consider how the relational nature of bodies and materials allows personhood to be experienced, performed, and extended through a smile, a stone, or a glint of gold.
2014 Enamel, Stone, and Gold: Probing Composite Mouths and Personhood in Nineteenth Century New York City. Paper presented at the 113th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington D.C.
View Abstract
Bodies are not closed systems, but rather dynamic and permeable social entities composed of multiple materials and temporalities. As Ingold notes, bodies are “flow(s) of materials comprising corporeal life” (2011:16). Expressions of identity and formations of personhood are relational, generated and distributed through social interactions and material things. While this sense of relational, extended personhood is well attended to in prehistoric archaeology, historical archaeologists have engaged less with theories of personhood and tend to rely more on modern Western notions of bounded individuals and bodies (Wilkinson 2013; Fowler 2010). In this paper, we examine 19th century dental prostheses—a stone tooth, a gold bridge, and gold fillings—found with commingled skeletal remains in the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (ca. 1820-1846) in New York City. A microhistorical analysis of these prostheses demonstrates how objects and substances are incorporated into bodies, becoming part of the overlapping processes and temporalities that make up corporeal life. The mouth is an especially active social interface where materials with biological and geological histories of their own intersect with experiences, habits, and practices. We examine the microscale entanglements of class, gender, medical practices, and ideologies of morality and aesthetics in the dynamic social landscape of 19th century New York City. Finally, we consider how the relational nature of bodies and materials allows personhood to be experienced, performed, and extended through a smile, a stone, or a glint of gold.
Posters
Ellis, Meredith A.B.
2011 Severe rickets at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. Presented at the 80th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Minneapolis, MN.
2017 Fetal Remains in Bioarchaeology: A Case Study from the 19th Century Spring Street Presbyterian Church
Hosek, Lauren and Shannon A. Novak
2011 A Case of Metastasized Prostate Cancer from the Spring Street Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. Presented at the 80th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Minneapolis, MN.
