Compare methods

	Historical Auxology	Anthropometric History
Field	Economic History	Economic History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	1995
Originator	James Tanner (auxology); Richard Steckel and growth-profile economic historians	Robert Fogel, Richard Steckel, John Komlos and collaborators
Type	Growth-trajectory analysis	Biological standard-of-living estimation
Seminal source	Steckel, R. H. (1995). Stature and the Standard of Living. Journal of Economic Literature, 33(4), 1903-1940.	Steckel, R. H. (1995). Stature and the Standard of Living. Journal of Economic Literature, 33(4), 1903-1940.
Aliases	Growth-profile history, Age-specific stature analysis, Catch-up growth history, Developmental anthropometrics	Height history, Stature-based welfare analysis, Biological standard of living, Auxological economic history
Related	4	4
Summary	Historical auxology shifts the anthropometric lens from final adult height to the trajectory of growth itself, analysing how children and adolescents grew, age by age, in the past. Where cohort-stature analysis treats terminal height as a single summary, auxology reads the whole developmental curve—the timing and tempo of growth, the depth of stunting at particular ages, the adolescent growth spurt, and the phenomenon of catch-up growth when deprivation eases. Grounded in James Tanner's clinical science of human growth and adapted to historical child-height data from slave manifests, school surveys and reformatory records, the approach can localise hardship to specific developmental windows. A dip in stature relative to modern standards at age eight, followed by recovery, tells a different story than uniform lifelong stunting. By treating growth as a process rather than an endpoint, historical auxology extracts finer-grained, age-targeted evidence about when in childhood living conditions bit hardest.	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.