Richard Steckel, Clark Spencer Larsen, Charlotte Roberts & Joerg Baten (Eds.),The Backbone of Europe: Health, Diet, Work, and Violence over Two Millennia, Cambridge University Press, 2018, 476 pp. $85.43Hardcover

When traditional measures for material welfare are scarce or unreliable, a population’s average stature reflects its cumulative net nutrition during economic development. In the 1970s, Robert Fogel and his graduate students led the effort to integrate statures as an economic measure for welfare with their studies of American slavery, and the use of anthropometrics has been extended to various fields in economics, development, and economic history (Fogel & Engerman, 1974; Fogel, 1989; Fogel, 1994). Few scholars have done as much to advance the use of height and anthropometric measures as Richard Steckel, a Fogel graduate student. Demonstrating extraordinary creativityto bring yet another measurement tool thatsheds light on economic conditions, Steckel has extended the use of stature of the living to the skeletal remains of the dead.