Two Millennia of European History Written on Bones

Well-being and Immiseration

This week I’ve been analyzing a literal treasure trove of data, compiled by The European History of Health Project. This is a massive, collaborative, anthropometric research initiative, which analyzed over 15,119 skeletons from more than a hundred sites across Europe.

Skeleton of a woman in Yorkshire Museum Source

Human bones are an incredible source of quantitative data, because they can last for centuries and millennia under the right conditions. And when they are unearthed by archaeologists, they can tell us a lot about people they came from: what was their health and wellbeing, how likely they were to be injured or killed, and more recently what was their ancestry. Today I will focus on one particular indicator of biological well-being: stature or average population height (and in future posts I plan to deal with other insights that skeletal data can yield).