Tallest in the World: Native Americans of the Great Plains in the Nineteenth Century
Author(s)
Steckel, Richard H.; Prince, Joseph M.
Abstract
The new anthropometric history has emerged in the past quarter century to shed considerable light on the standard of living or quality of life in the past, particularly in settings where traditional monetary measures or health indicators are lacking. Research in the field is based primarily on average height, but also uses other measures such as the body mass index to assess net nutrition, which is dietary intake minus claims made by work and disease. Using average heights, economic historians have discovered the extraordinary malnutrition of American slave children relative to adults, charted nutritional aspects of human welfare during industrialization, and estimated the contribution of improving health to long-term economic growth. We use the methodology of anthropometric history to investigate the nutritional status of equestrian nomads who lived on the Great Plains during the middle of the nineteenth century, a group for whom traditional measures of economic performance are unavailable. Historians have frequently portrayed Native Americans as merely unfortunate victims of European disease and aggression, with lives in disarray following the arrival of Columbus and other explorers, conquerors, and settlers. While much decimation occurred, the data we analyze show that some Native Americans were remarkably ingenious, adaptive, and successful in the face of exceptional demographic stress. Using height data originally collected by Franz Boas, we show that the Plains nomads were tallest in the world during the mid-nineteenth century, a result confirmed in travelers’ accounts and by the skeletal record. The analysis provides a useful mirror for understanding determinants of health in general.
