Economic historians have long been familiar with the challenges posed by meager economic data. The constraint is acute for many developed countries in the early and middle phases of industrialization, when information on real Gross National Product per capita is unavailable or at best crudely estimated. Although useful income statistics are available for many countries for much of the nineteenth century, as a whole these series lack both annual and regional detail that is important for appraising the causes and consequences of long-run economic growth (Maddison 1995).

Over the past quarter century scholars have used anthropometric measures such as average stature in part to address this problem. Constructed from individual level data from military records and other sources for birth cohorts beginning in the eighteenth century, various height series have added important new information on the welfare aspects of industrialization. Sometimes oversold as “the” biological standard of living, heights are a measure of net nutrition during the growing years, and capture an important aspect of the quality of life that has entered debates between optimists and pessimists. Height series for several countries show that both groups can claim at least partial victory (Steckel and Floud 1997).

This paper vastly extends the chronological reach of anthropometric history by illustrating how skeletal remains can be used to depict important aspects of wellbeing over the millennia. The approach, then, embraces human activities from the era of hunter-gatherers onward to settled agriculture, the rise of cities, global exploration and colonization, and eventual industrialization.