Compare methods

	Historical Auxology	Historical Life Table Construction
Field	Economic History	Historical Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	1662
Originator	James Tanner (auxology); Richard Steckel and growth-profile economic historians	John Graunt (origins); Coale, Demeny, Ledermann (model life tables); applied by Wrigley-Schofield and Bengtsson
Type	Growth-trajectory analysis	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	Growth-profile history, Age-specific stature analysis, Catch-up growth history, Developmental anthropometrics	Historical mortality table building, Model life table fitting, Survivorship reconstruction, Paleodemographic life tables
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.	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.