Tales From the Crypt

By Coclanis, Peter A

A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it can be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. (Orwell 1961, 85)

As time passes, it has become more and more clear that George Orwell got a lot of things right over the course of his short life. Not just about politics and/or the English language either, but also about the material foundations-or, better yet, the backbone-of history. To be sure, Orwell’s materialism was not simple, extending far beyond the forces and relations of production, to which the intellectually prescient quote above from The Road to Wigan Pier (originally published in 1937) amply attests. In highlighting the role, indeed, the centrality of diet and nutrition in history, Orwell anticipated work done generations later: After all, William Langer’s famous essay in the American Historical Review on the potato didn’t appear until 1963, and the birth of modern anthropometric history not until more than a decade later. Today, of course, almost all economic historians acknowledge the importance of studying health and nutrition in past times, not because of some Orwellian scenario, but rather because of the scholarly trail blazed in large part by Richard H. Steckel, coeditor with Jerome C. Rose, of the book under review. Although data on health and nutrition have not always jibed with the conventional wisdom, such data, clearly, have enabled economists and other social scientists to advance increasingly sophisticated interpretations of the past.

A generation ago, scholars who weighed in on matters relating to living standards in earlier periods of time didn’t have a great deal to go on. They could employ fragmentary data on prices, wages, and the like, extrapolate from material culture (extant buildings, furniture, art, ceramics, clothing, etc.), or rely on descriptions/ discussions in qualitative sources of one type or another, from diaries to Dickens, or epistles to Engels, as it were. However, things began to change in the mid-1970s. If some trace the beginnings of a new approach to assessing historical living standards to the noted historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s work in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most view the group working at the University of Chicago in collaboration with future Nobelist Robert W. Fogel as the true founders of the new approach, based on biometric measurements, known today as anthropomtrie history (Cuff 2004). Biometric measurements had long been employed by physical anthropologists, human biologists, and auxologists, but in different ways and for different purposes. What Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman, Steckel, and other members of the team working out of the University of Chicago did was to begin to use such measurements explicitly to get at questions of interest to demographic and economic historians, particularly those questions relating to living standards among populations for whom data on more conventional measures of welfare were lacking. In so doing, the Chicago team developed new methods, asked new questions, and drew startling new conclusions, all of which have led many to consider anthropomtrie history to be the most important breakthrough in the field of economic history over the past quarter century (Fogel, Engerman, and Trussell 1982; Fogel et al. 1983; Komlos and Baten 2004; Engerman 2004; Cuff 2004).

Simply stated, anthropomtrie history is the systematic study of human height, stature, and other correlates (birth weight, age at menarche, age of pubescent male voice change, etc.) among historical populations. The approach is predicated on the assumption that nutritional status until adulthood is a determining factor of the degree to which either an individual-or an entire population, for that matter-reaches its genetic height/stature potential.1 This assumption, it should be noted, is supported by decades of biological and biometric research. To put things in more formal terms, the nutritional status of either an individual or a population of individuals can be viewed as a measure of the intake of nutrients minus the claims of basal metabolism, energy expenditure, and disease encounters. The higher or better the nutritional status, as defined above, the more nutrients available for healthy growth (Komlos 1992; Steckel 1995; Coclanis and Komlos 1997; Cuff 2004).

Not surprisingly, nutrition influences both fertility and mortality. If human height and stature can be used as proxies for nutritional status, then changes in the height and stature of a population can help us to understand and explain demographic trends. Moreover, because food consumption in the past constituted an important component of total “income,” particularly in preindustrial societies, height and stature-and changes in the same-can be seen as reflections of economic conditions and rough proxies for material well-being. Height and stature are thus important variables with implications for both demographic and economic processes (Komlos 1992; Steckel 1995; Coclanis and Komlos 1997; Cuff 2004).

The first studies done by scholars explicitly and selfconsciously employing anthropomtrie methods began to appear in the late 1970s and early 1980s.2 Some studies were based on longitudinal analysis of anthropomtrie data, whereas others were based on cross-sectional analysis. Taken together, such studies have underwritten and supported significant revisions and reinterpretations of important historical problems and, in certain cases, of entire historical periods.

This was certainly true of perhaps the most bitterly contested standard-of-living controversy of them all: the scholarly debate over the economic impact of early industrialization on English workers. Although this controversy (sometimes referred to as the Hobsbawm-Hartwell debate) can be said to have begun with Marx and Engels, it took on modern form only in the late 1940s (Ashton 1948; Hobsbawm 1964; Hartwell 1971). Once ignited or reignited, it raged for the next 25 years and continues at a somewhat less feverish pitch even today. From the late 1940s to the 1970s, the debate revolved largely around the question of workers’ real wages, or, more specifically, the question of whether such wages rose or fell during the early Industrial Revolution. So-called optimists, generally mainstream economic historians, argued for rising real wages, whereas so-called pessimists, social historians often with Marxist or Marxisant leanings, reached the opposite conclusion. Quality-oflife issues-those relating to changes in the work experience with industrialization, the degree of security or insecurity felt by workers, the purported increased incidence of anomie and estrangement among laborers, and the like-were sometimes aired as well, but by and large the debate was based for the most part, at least at first, on wage estimates and cost estimates for diverse “baskets” of goods. Because data regarding both wages and prices were extremely incomplete, and because all kinds of assumptions, interpolations, and extrapolations were needed before data of either kind could be employed, it is not surprising that the debate between “optimists” and “pessimists” long remained unresolved. Indeed, it remains somewhat unsettled even to this day (Cannadine 1984; Mokyr 1999, 113-26). Perhaps this is so despite or, ironically, because of the introduction of a powerful new approach, based on new sources and methods, beginning in the late 1970s: anthropometric history.

To make a long story short: by the mid-1980s, it was probably fair to say that the best available data on wages and prices suggested that workers’ real incomes had improved with industrialization (Lindert and Williamson 1983). This optimistic conclusion did not necessarily convince the pessimists, however, who for a variety of reasons had by then increasingly moved away from quantifiable terrain to more defensible qualitative ground, arguing that even if real wages had improved with industrialization, the quality of life had diminished so much for workers as to more than make up for whatever gains in real wages they may have received. Then came Roderick Floud and Kenneth Wachter, employing anthropometric data, to gum up the works.

Without delving too deeply into the intricacies of Floud and Wachter’s (1982,422-52) contribution to the legendary special issue of Social Science History devoted to anthropometric history, they put biometric measurement squarely on the table as a nonmonetized indicator of living standards in the past (Floud 2004). Their crucial finding-based on a comparison of “height-at-age” data for the impoverished male wards of the Marine Society in London and the far wealthier students at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst- was that “poor boys” in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century London were tiny in comparison with their social superiors at the elite military school. This broad finding held true at eve\ry age, and, despite more rigorous analysis of the Sandhurst data by scholars since the publication of the Floud-Wachter article, the overall pattern they found in 1982 is still valid today (Komlos 2005).

Why were the poor boys of the Marine Society so short? Shouldn’t the rising income tide induced by industrialization have lifted all ships, including theirs? What if the anthropometric data employed by Floud and Wachter were fundamentally flawed? Indeed, what if the entire approach was flawed as well? Good questions all, questions that provoked lots of new research, the burden of which was not merely to sustain but to extend the range, scope, and implications of the anthropometrie approach.

In complicating the relationship among economic growth, rising income levels, and material living standards in industrializing England, Floud and Wachter helped to spark additional work on England and similar work on other regions during periods of early industrialization. Although these studies differ in details, the upshot was to challenge the assumption that rising per capita income necessarily led in linear, much less lockstep fashion to enhanced physical well-being (Komlos 1995; Steckel 1995; Haines 2004; Cuff 2004). In fact, for some groups during early industrialization, rising income actually meant a decline in physical well-being because the income gains were associated with greater levels of urbanization, manufacturing employment, and commercialized agriculture, which under nineteenthcentury conditions often led to declining nutritional levels, lower birth weights, heightened infant and overall mortality rates, and reduced height and stature-as measured by body mass indices (BMI), for example. Indeed, one of the most interesting and important results of the anthropometric work on early industrialization in the West was the analytical distinction- associated primarily with my sometime collaborator John Komlos- between material living standards and the “biological standard of living,” measures that could and at times did move in opposite directions (Komlos 1995, 1998).

Steckel’s early anthropometric work focused not on white workers during the European Industrial Revolution, but rather on blacks in North America. In this regard, it is not unfair to say that Steckel, along with several other “Chicago” colleagues, was primarily responsible for pioneering the anthropometric history of Africans and African Americans in North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This work at once complicated and enriched our understanding of the material conditions experienced by American slaves and the biological effects of the same. If some of their results were unexpected-adult black slaves in North America were quite tall and robust in comparison with most populations in the world at the timeother findings were chilling, particularly Steckel’s on the (presumably calculated) stunting of slave children by their masters until said children were old enough to contribute economically (Steckel 1979; Margo and Steckel 1982; Steckel 1986a, 1986b, 1986c).

Various other areas of inquiry have also been affected and, I would argue, energized by anthropometric work: medieval European history, U.S. women’s history, and Native American history come immediately to mind. In recent years, moreover, such work is increasingly being done on non-Western parts of the world (Cuff 2004).

Over the years, Steckel-present at the creation, so to speak-has consistently pushed anthropometric history in new directions, liaised with scholars in allied disciplines, and promoted big collaborative projects. And it is to the biggest, most important, and most far-reaching of such collaborative projects-Steckel’s “global history of health” project, one result of which is The Backbone of History volume-to which we now shall turn (Steckel and Rose 2002; Steckel 2005).

The origins of the global history of health project date back to a session on bioarchaeology held at the 1988 meeting in Detroit, Michigan, of the Economic History Association. At that meeting, Steckel, ever enterprising, met with the session panelists-the physical anthropologists Jerome C. Rose, George J. Armelagos, Alan H. Goodman, and Debra L. Martin-about matters of common interest between economic historians interested in anthropometric research and physical anthropologists. Although the participants acknowledged the current lack of communication between their respective disciplines, they agreed that both groups had much to learn from each other and should continue to find ways to promote further dialogue and possible collaborations (xi-xii).

With these goals in mind, Steckel and Rose organized a planning conference-to take place in Columbus, Ohio, in the fall of 1990- around the theme of health and nutrition in the Western Hemisphere in historic and prehistoric times. Among other topics, participants discussed ways to train historians to use the methods of physical anthropology, particularly the analysis of skeletal remains and the interpretation of skeletal lesions, to answer questions of historical as well as anthropological interest. A second, much larger meeting, growing out of the first one, was held in Columbus in September 1993. At that meeting, historians were in fact trained in the methods of physical anthropology, research teams were set up, and the basic research design and timetable for what would become the Backbone of History project were established. In the little over two years that followed, the various research teams conducted their research, wrote up their results, and sent their data to researchers at The Ohio State University, who assembled and cleaned the team- level data, entering everything into a common database. A third meeting was then held in Columbus in March 1996, at which time the team-level and overall results were presented and discussed. The volume under review here, The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, edited by Steckel and Rose, comprises the revised papers from the March 1996 meeting (xi-xii).

And what a formidable vertebra it is: 18 essays that, in the words of the editors, “study long-term trends in health in the Western Hemisphere using evidence of chronic dis ease or biological stress measurable from skeletal remains” (4), which essays, the editors hope, will “lead to the flowering of macrobioarchaeology (7).” Whoa! At this point, it might be a good idea to backtrack a bit. For starters, a few questions are in order. What is it the authors of the individual essays did? How did they do it? What is the upshot of their work?

Let us start with some first principles, as it were: the basic premises of The Backbone of History. First and foremost is the fundamental premise that health matters, that it has always been a key factor in human history. second, the editors and contributors all shared the view that “[sjkeletal measures of health . . . furnish the best and, in many cases, the only picture available of human health over the millennia" (3). Unlike most earlier work done by anthropometric historians, which relied largely on written records, the authors of the articles in The Backbone of History employed more or less uniform methods to record, "read," and interpret extant skeletal (including dental) remains from over 12,500 individuals who lived in the Western Hemisphere during the 6,000-year period between roughly 4000 BCE and the early 1900s (6). From those remains, or, more accurately, from lesions on those remains, the authors were able to make some limited generalizations not only about the health and nutritional status of the individuals represented, but also about the health and nutritional conditions in the societies to which they belonged. More specifically, through some utterly ingenious methodological maneuvers, Steckel, Rose, and physical anthropologist Paul Sciulli use a number of attributes of health recoverable from skeletal and dental remains-stature and evidence of infections and degenerative diseases primarily-to devise an overall health index. They then apply this multivariate index, after careful and judicious adjustments, to the skeletal remains analyzed in the study pooled into 65 discrete sites. After further adjustments, they then convert their findings to an assumed "reference population" living at each site and develop ranked health indexes for 65 reference populations that occupied one or another part of the Western Hemisphere over some of the last 6,000 or so years (61-93).

Before discussions of either the empirical findings in the individual essays or the health index itself, a few words about the composition of the index are in order. For a variety of reasons, the index is one of The Backbone of History's most important scholarly contributions. Building on the pioneering bioarchaeological research and methodology done by the contributors to Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture (Cohen and Armelagos 1984) in constructing their index, Steckel, Sciulli, and Rose focus on seven key sources of information regarding health and nutrition recoverable from analysis of skeletal and dental remains/lesions: (1) growth/ stature; (2) linear enamel hypoplasias; (3) porotic hyperostosis/ anemia; (4) periosteal reactions/infectious disease; (5) trauma; (6) degenerative disease; and (7) caries, dental abscesses, and tooth loss (12).

The fundamental principle underlying the health index, obviously, is that important information about health and nutrition is inscripted on the body. More specifically, the creators of the index adopt a "general stress perspective," which is to say that they believe that the analysis of stress-which Goodman and Martin define as a "measurable physiological disruption or perturbation that has consequence for individuals and populations"-provides an avenue to such information (12). To be sure, certain problems have to be overcome be\fore one can use this perspective: In analyzing historical remains, the specific "stressor" is seldom known; the body's physiological response to a particular stress event is unobservable; multiple interacting stressors are often involved; particularly acute stress events and conditions (yellow fever, measles, malaria, smallpox, etc.) seldom leave lesions on humans before killing them (64-65). Moreover, some aspects of health (e.g., vision and hearing) generally cannot be ascertained from skeletal remains (65). But one thing is clear, nonetheless: the interaction of stressor or (more likely) multiple stressors with the body does in fact often lead to a physiological response that "leaves recognizable scars in skeletal tissues" (12). And it is by reading and interpreting such scars that we come to know something about health and nutrition in the dark recesses of the past.

Let us turn to the remains and the scars themselves. Growth/ stature is pretty straightforward and self-explanatory. If one uses standard anthropometric protocols and conventions, skeletal remains can be made to yield some excellent data on these matters: a skeleton of x length suggests a standing height of y length, and so on. Other component parts of the index are less straightforward and selfexplanatory, however. Linear enamel hypoplasias (LEH) are tooth enamel defects caused by "disruption during the enamel secretion stage of tooth crown development" (22). In "Reconstructing Health Profiles from Skeletal Remains," one of the three methodological chapters (11-60), Goodman and Martin point out that the significance of LEH defects (transverse or linear areas of thin enamel) "rests in the fact that they provide an indelible indicator of periods of stress during tooth crown development (prenatally to 12 months for deciduous teeth, and birth to 7 years for permanent teeth)" (22- 23). Porotic hypemstosis, the third indicator, is a descriptive term for "lesions on the cranium, the roof of the eye orbits, and the ends of long bones," lesions associated with anemia (27).

Moving on, we find that periosteal reactions to many infectious diseases leave "diagnostic markers" of one type or another on skeletal remains-various types of infections and inflammatory conditions bring about elevation of the fibrous outer periosteal layers of bones, for example, and microorganisms such as Staphylococcus and Streptococcus leave particular types of bone lesions-and these markers can be read by researchers trained in the methods of bioarchaelogy (32-36). The types of markers left by the fifth indicator, trauma-"lesions caused by physical force"-are quite different: bone fractures caused by accidents, or bones "crushed from the blow of a blunt object," for example (36-39). The presence of osteoarthritis and degenerative joint disease, the sixth indicator employed in the index, shows up clearly in skeletal remains, as do various types of dental problems-caries, abscesses, tooth loss, and the like (41-47).

TABLE 1. Distribution of Skeletons in the Database

With all due respect to Mark Antony, then, a lot besides "good" is interred in people's bones, to which the research of the 50-odd contributors to The Backbone of History attests. In the broadest sense, what can 12,520 skeletons collected from 218 sites- aggregated into 65 "based on ecological and chronological similarity"-over a 6,000-year period tell us about health and stature in the Western Hemisphere (61)? And in what ways, if any, do these bony remains change things interpretively?

We should admit straightaway that the skeletal remains don't tell us everything we'd like to know about health and nutrition in the Western Hemisphere over the course of this long period. They do tell us certain things, however, especially about certain groups in certain places at certain times. Almost 80 percent of the skeletal remains were of Native Americans, with the remainder split pretty evenly between Euro-Americans and African Americans. As table 1 indicates, two-thirds of the Native Americans represented lived in North America, as did all the Euro-Americans and African Americans represented. More than half the Native American remains dated from pre-Columbian times, whereas 90 percent of the Euro-American skeletons and all the African American skeletons were from after 1750 CE.3 Within these limits, significant as they are, the skeletal data are quite revealing, particularly when adjusted to represent living populations (4-6, 61-93). Moreover, as Steckel and Rose indicate, ". . . [although] these data are unfamiliar to most social scientists, . . . they are likely to be the best single source available to scholars for measuring and analyzing very long-term trends in health” (5).

To this reviewer, the result that jumps out from the data assembled in The Backbone of History is the tremendous variation in health levels in the Western Hemisphere across space and over time. Health levels varied considerably by ethnicity, too: Native Americans claimed the highest 18 spots on the health index (and 26 of the first 27 places), but also 8 of the 9 places nearest the bottom (72-79). We have all heard much about the demographic catastrophe experienced by many Native Americans in the aftermath of 1492, of course, but how many of us knew that adult male Plains Indians were the tallest people in the world in the late nineteenth century? Insofar as height can be used as a rough proxy for overall health, this finding-by Steckel and Joseph Prince (2001)-is extremely important, as contributors S. Ryan Johansson and Douglas Owsley make clear in their essay, “Welfare History on the Great Plains” in The Backbone of History (524-60).

What about Euro-Americans and African Americans? How did they fare on the index? These two groups were represented in only 14 of the 65 aggregated sites included in the health index, and, according to Steckel, Sciulli, and Rose, the groups “overwhelmingly were situated in the middle and lower rungs on this scale.” Indeed, “[o]nly 3 out of these 14 sites (two Euro-American and one African American) were situated above the median” (74). Plantation slaves (and former slaves) working in the South Carolina low country ranked 63rd on the overall index, which will surprise few who have worked on the history of this area, long known for unhealthiness and the harshness of its labor regimen during slavery times (Wood 1974; Coclanis 1989; Jones 1990; Dusinberre 1996). Researcher Ted A. Rathbun, who analyzed the skeletal remains at this site, found that:

[t]he former slaves exhibited signs of childhood stress and anemia, and among adults the women had shorter life spans. Poor diets and parasite loads provoked anemia, as indicated by the frequency of cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis, and infection with subsequent recovery appears in over 60 percent of the sample. About 15 percent of the adults expressed expanded diploe, which suggests sickle-cell anemia .. . Skeletal changes associated with demanding physical labor were ubiquitous, as shown by arthritic changes at the major joints and by the early onset of vertebral degeneration. Benign cortical defects of the humerus, as well as a number of extremely large rhomboid sulci of the clavicle, suggested both heavy physical labor and strength. Initial chemical analyses indicated a relatively high exposure to lead and a diet high in plant foods . . . More extensive analysis of the bone chemical data . . . revealed dietary variations along gender and age parameters. Older individuals as a whole, and females in general, appeared to have eaten less meat, while nuts and seafood were common in the diet. (Rathbun and Steckel 214)

Individual readers will be drawn to different essays in The Backbone of History, depending on their particular interests and areas of scholarly specialization. Certain findings, however, are of such broad moment that they deserve to be singled out. After digesting the data relating to preColumbian America, for example, it would be difficult to argue that Native Americans lived in a prelapsarian world where health conditions were uniformly good. To be sure, in some areas (e.g., coastal areas of southern Brazil c. 1000 CE), conditions seem to have been extraordinarily healthy, but such conditions did not characterize other parts of preColumbian America, according to Walter Alves Neves and Veronica Wesolowski (376-400). The findings of Ann L. W. Stodder et al. suggest that living conditions and health outcomes were particularly precarious among Native Americans in the Southwest during the pre-Columbian and protohistorical eras, but other pre-Columbian groups also ranked low on the overall health index (72-79, 481-505). Similarly, the traditional notion that human health improved ipso facto with the advent of agriculture-a notion increasingly challenged by paleoepidemiologists since Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture (Cohen and Armelagos 1984) was published-is put to rest by several contributors to The Backbone of History: Productivity gains from agriculture often were accompanied by a narrowing of diets, increasingly sedentary behavior (at least seasonally), and increased disease loads caused by greater commingling with domesticated animals, population growth, and increased population concentration. In many cases, the net result of the so-called Neolithic Revolution was diminished human health-at least for a time (343-75, 406-39). Certainly, the finding by Rathbun that free blacks in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia were “remarkably healthy” contrasts sharply with the same author’s findings on African American plantation slaves in the low country of South Carolina (208- 25). The above findings merely represent the tip of the iceberg (the cervical vertebrae in the backbone?). To misappropriate a popular expression: So many sites, so much time!

For all its virtues, The Backbone of History raises as many questionsas it answers, and there is no gainsaying the fact that it is a tough, tough read. First, there are some questions. Steckel and Rose have organized and executed a truly Herculean research project, but they would be the first to admit that 12,520 skeletons and 65 sites-or even 218 disaggregated sites-cannot capture, much less encapsulate, the health history of the populations inhabiting various and sundry parts of a landmass of almost 40 million square kilometers over a 6,000-year period. Moreover, both the editors and most of the individual contributorsas well as commentators Armelagos, Peter J. Brown, and Philip D. Curtin in the epilogue-are quick to point out the many limitations of bioarchaeological evidence in general and the so-called Mark I health index in particular. Certainly, statisticians and operations research types can challenge various aspects of the methodology, particularly its informality: stated simply, there is not always sufficient concern with sample sizes, possible selectivity biases, the reporting of standard errors in measurement, and so forth. Not to mention the fact that what Alfred North Whitehead (1925) and, later, Oskar Morgenstern (1963) famously called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” is (wittingly or unwittingly) apparent throughout.

What about the book’s structure and prose? For the record, let me begin by conceding that The Backbone of History is organized in an eminently logical and coherent way. The volume is divided into 9 sections consisting of an introduction, 3 methodological chapters, 5 chapters on Euro-Americans and African Americans in North America, 2 chapters on Native Americans in Central America, 2 chapters on Native Americans and Euro-Americans in South America, 5 chapters on Native Americans in North America, a chapter by Steckel and Rose on health patterns in the Western Hemisphere, another devoted to their conclusions, and a brief 2-chapter epilogue comprising critiques and commentary by Armelagos and Brown, and by Curtin, respectively. That said, I would suggest that readers employ the following strategy in tackling the book: Start with the introduction and the 3 chapters on method, proceed to Steckel and Rose’s chapter on health patterns and their conclusions, and then go on to the epilogue. After doing so, read the 14 empirical chapters on discrete sites. Then circle back to Steckel and Rose’s 2 chapters and to the epilogue. Doing otherwise can lead to confusion and may be dangerous to one’s (mental) health, not to mention one’s aesthetic sensibilities. Not only are the subjects difficult but also, it seems to me, some authors have modeled their prose rather more on Stalin’s five-year plans than on Strunk and White. Whereas I realize that this criticism is a bit unfair-it is not easy to discuss methodological issues and to analyze data in crystalline prose-it seems that one can turn to almost any page of The Backbone of History and find highly realized (almost Platonic) forms of “social science speak.” The following sentence, from C. S. Larsen, A. W. Crosby, et al.’s chapter on populations living along the Georgia Bight in the precontact and postcontact periods, is not atypical: “Most commonly present in the fifth lumbar vertebra of the lower back, high frequencies of fractures have been reported in human populations engaged in physically demanding lifestyles (e.g., traditional Eskimos), or in components of populations with heavy workloads (e.g., athletes)” (428). Or this one, from Sciulli and James Oberly’s chapter on Native Americans in eastern North America: “Tests of association indicate that cribra orbitalia, with especially high frequencies in the Monongahela sample; porotic hyperostosis, with high frequencies in the Pearson, Sun Watch, and Monongahela samples; skeletal infection, with a low frequency in the Buffalo sample; and permanent canine LEH, with a high frequency in the Pearson sample, differed among the groups . . .” (467). Or this- from James M. Davidson, Jerome C. Rose, et al.’s chapter on African American life in the Southwest-”Only one individual at Cedar Grove exhibited a classically diagnostic dental defect of the incisors characteristic of congenital syphilis . . . (although a later study of the dental casts identified three more cases), while this later analysis found none at the nineteenth-century urban First African Baptist Church skeletal series…” (254). One could continue, but I trust that my point has been made: one should not go to The Backbone of History for object lessons in prose style.

But go to it, nonetheless. For Steckel and Rose’s volume offers an introduction to one of this generation’s most important scholarly projects in the historical social sciences. The contributors are currently at work refining their findings for the Western Hemisphere even as they move on to a similar macrobioarchaeological study of European populations. As they do, others are also pushing anthropomtrie history into new directions; conferences on the subject are being held; an important new journal, Economics and Human Biology, edited out of Munich by its founder, John Komlos, is creating a scholarly stir; and key practitioners are becoming scholarly celebrities of sorts, insofar as coverage in publications such as the New York Times (October 29, 2002, D1, D6) and The New Yorker (Bilger 2004) is a barometer! Orwell may have exaggerated a bit in stating that all of us are primarily bags for putting food into: that proposition seems extreme even for this reviewer’s somewhat sociobiological tastes. But, clearly, what might be called “the anthropometric turn” in economic history-a turn encouraged by Richard Steckel as much as anyone else-has afforded us fresh, often unparalleled insights into the material dimensions of human life.

Richard H. Steckel and Jerome C. Rose, eds. The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

NOTES

1. A particularly striking example of this point was reported in an article on the front page of the New York Times (February 11, 2006, A1, A14). The subject of the story was a horrific case of child abuse that revolved around the systematic starvation of four children by their adoptive mother. In the course of covering the story, the Times revealed that 27 months previously, when the children had been taken away from the adopted mother, one of the children-at the age of 19-stood 48 inches tall and weighed but 45 pounds. After having been put on a normal diet at that time, he grew 15 inches and gained 95 pounds in a little over two years; today he stands 5 feet 3 inches and weighs 140 pounds. His three younger brothers, subjects of similar abuse, also registered sharp gains in stature over the same period.

2. The special 1982 issue of Social Science History entirely devoted to anthropometric history was particularly important in this regard. Some would note, with some legitimacy, to earlier turning points: Stanley L. Engerman’s (1976) suggestive little piece on slave heights in Local Population Studies or, as mentioned in the text, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s even earlier work (Cuff 2004).

3. A research team led by T. Douglas Price of the University of Wisconsin discovered skeletal remains of at least 10 Africans in a church burial ground in Campeche, Mexico (on the Yucatan Peninsula), that date from sometime between the mid-sixteenth century to the early seventeenth century. These are the earliest African skeletal remains yet found in the Western Hemisphere (New York Times, January 31, 2006, D1, D4). For the complete results of this discovery, see T. Douglas Price, Vera Tiesler, and James H. Burton (2006).

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PETER A. COCLANIS

Department of History

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Copyright Heldref Publications Fall 2006

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