ARTICLES Skeletal Health in the Western Hemisphere From 4000 B.C. to the Present RICHARD H. STECKEL, JEROME C. ROSE, CLARK SPENCER LARSEN, AND PHILLIP L. WALKER 1 Beginning in the late 1980s, re- searchers in various fields, especially history, economics, and physical an- thropology, discovered a mutual in- terest in health and its spatial and temporal patterning in human his- tory. Economic historians have been keenly interested in health in recent years, basing their assessments on heights, primarily those of adult men as learned from military muster rolls. Physical anthropologists have studied numerous skeletal remains that can be used to reconstruct living heights from long-bone lengths. They have also documented patterns of health based on various paleopathological indicators. A key development in the study of health in the distant past occurred with the publication of Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, edited by Mark Cohen and George Armelagos. 2 Cohen 3 had argued in The Food Crisis in Prehistory that the population in- creases prior to the Neolithic set the stage for nutritional deficiencies that stimulated the development of agri- culture. If this were the case, the evi- dence for nutritional deficiencies would have occurred before the Neo- lithic, and this crisis would have been the motivation to shift to primary food production. Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture compiled paleo- pathological studies by various re- searchers from around the world, ad- dressing long-term trends in health, especially the impact of the shift from foraging to farming. These studies showed a generally consistent pattern of increasing morbidity wherever and whenever the transition took place. The book was limited, however, in that contributors used different data coding schemes, which calls into question the comparability of results. Despite this caveat, the contributors’ effort confirmed the result of a hand- ful of previously reported regional studies of populations from North America, northeastern Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean, that the agri- cultural transition beginning in the early Holocene was accompanied by a cost to human health and quality of life. THE BACKBONE OF HISTORY In the late 1980s, Richard Steckel and Jerome Rose organized a large group of economic and medical histo- rians, demographers, and physical an- thropologists in order to document and analyze the history of health in the Western Hemisphere using data from archeological skeletons. 4 In or- There has been long-standing interest in the history of human health and well-being over the millennia. The major sources of information are written ac- counts of life in the past, such as wills, diaries, tax records, military records, and court documents. These sources, however, may be inaccurate and are susceptible to distortion by selective reporting and biases in the cultural perspectives and objectives of both writers and users. Data on variation in the heights of people who lived over the last several centuries have recently become available for several populations and provide a less subjective source of information on the history of health (for a review see Steckel 1 ). Although valuable, these records are mostly for males living in now-industrialized nations such as Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States; they certainly do not provide a comprehensive picture of the history of health across continents or regions. Moreover, height measures only one dimension of health during the years of human growth and development. It does not provide an overall measure of health status throughout the life cycle. Richard H. Steckel is Professor of Economics and Anthropology at The Ohio State University, Columbus. With Jerome Rose, he co-directs the History of Health in the Western Hemisphere Project, some of the results of which are presented in this article. Jerome C. Rose is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. In addition to his work on the Western Hemisphere project, he is currently directing bioarcheo- logical projects in Egypt and Jordan. Clark Spencer Larsen is Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at The Ohio State University. He has been involved in bioarcheological research throughout North America and Europe. Phillip L. Walker is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has conducted bioarcheological research in California, Russia, and Spain. He is currently excavating a Viking site in Iceland. Correspondence to: Richard H. Steckel, Department of Economics, The Ohio State Univer- sity, Columbus, OH 43210; steckel.1@osu.edu. Evolutionary Anthropology 11:142–155 (2002) DOI 10.1002/evan.10030 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). 142 Evolutionary Anthropology