Compare methods

	Anthropometric History	Historical Life Table Construction
Field	Economic History	Historical Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1995	1662
Originator	Robert Fogel, Richard Steckel, John Komlos and collaborators	John Graunt (origins); Coale, Demeny, Ledermann (model life tables); applied by Wrigley-Schofield and Bengtsson
Type	Biological standard-of-living estimation	Mortality estimation and survivorship modelling
Seminal source	Steckel, R. H. (1995). Stature and the Standard of Living. Journal of Economic Literature, 33(4), 1903-1940.	Wrigley, E. A., & Schofield, R. S. (1981). The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction. Edward Arnold / Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674690073
Aliases	Height history, Stature-based welfare analysis, Biological standard of living, Auxological economic history	Historical mortality table building, Model life table fitting, Survivorship reconstruction, Paleodemographic life tables
Related	4	4
Summary	Anthropometric history reads the material conditions of the past from the human body itself, using mean adult stature by birth cohort as a barometer of the biological standard of living. Final height reflects net nutritional status during the growth years—the food a child consumed minus the energy claimed by disease and physical labour—so a population's average height encodes the quality of life experienced by its members as they grew up. Pioneered by Robert Fogel, Richard Steckel and John Komlos, the approach exploits height records left by armies, prisons, slave registers and conscription boards. It proved its worth by revealing the antebellum puzzle—Americans growing shorter during decades of rising income—and by tracking living standards in places and periods where wage and price data fail. Steckel's influential surveys established stature as a complement, and sometimes a corrective, to conventional money-metric measures of welfare in economic history.	Historical life table construction is the craft of converting the patchy mortality evidence of the past—burial registers, family genealogies, monastic obituaries, even skeletal age-at-death distributions—into the formal apparatus of the life table: age-specific death rates, the probability of dying within each age interval, the number of survivors to each age, and expectation of life. The life table descends from John Graunt's 1662 reading of London's Bills of Mortality and Halley's Breslau table, but applying it to historical populations demands special care, since exposures are rarely known and deaths are often recorded without reliable ages. Historians therefore lean heavily on families of model life tables to smooth noisy data and fill missing age bands. Whether built as period tables capturing a single era's mortality or cohort tables following one birth-year group through life, these reconstructions are the indispensable summary of how, and how long, people lived in the past.