Historical Auxology

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.