How to (and How Not to) Analyze Deficient Height Samples

helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. 1 How to (and How Not to) Analyze Deficient Heights Samples The systematic study of the physical characteristics of human beings reach back well into the eighteenth century (Tanner, 1981). By the 1830s Adolphe Quetelet and Louis R. Villermé recognized that biological outcomes, such as physical stature were influenced both by the natural, as well as the socio-economic environment (Villermé, 1829; Quetelet, 1831). However, until the late 1960s, when French historians of the Annales tradition began to explore the socio-economic correlates of human height, the topic was of interest primarily to scholars in sister disciplines such as anthropology, medicine, or military history (Le Roy Ladurie, Bernageau, and Pasquet, 1969). The expansion of anthropometric history was brought about beginning in the mid-1970s by American cliometricians (quantitative economic historians), in search of a new measure of well-being in historical populations during the course of the last two centuries (Harris, 1994; Komlos, 1995; Steckel, 1995; Komlos and Cuff, 1998). Anthropometric historians are generally interested in the changes in mean height of