Abstract
Despite their widespread use in assessing nutritional status, anthropometric data have not previously been used to assess alleged war crimes. When eyewitness accounts or other documentation is unavailable, anthropometric analyses can be used to support or refute allegations of war crimes, or to explore situations in which war crimes may be suspected. I here introduce the field of anthropometrics, outlining its history and use, with emphasis on the interdisciplinary nature of the field. Three instances are provided in which anthropometric analysis might be successfully utilized to provide evidence for or against war crimes. I conclude with practical examples, highlighting anthropometric work that has already been completed, as well as suggesting ways that they may be extended.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
Stanley J. Ulijaszek, Francis E. Johnston and Michael A. Preece, eds., Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Growth and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 446.
- 2.
Ibid., 448.
- 3.
Francis Galton, “Regression towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 15 (1886): 246–263.
- 4.
For example, Edwin Chadwick led anthropometric surveys of British child factory workers in the 1833, as did Edwin Horner in 1837. In 1872, the Parliamentary Commission did another anthropometric study of children, in part, to be able to enforce the law on the age of child-workers. Anthropometric studies of children were completed on the other side of the Atlantic as well, though in part to understand human growth rather than to enforce age-limit requirements. See for example Henry Bowditch, “The Growth of Children, Studied by Galton’s Method of Percentile Grades,” Reprinted from The Twenty-Second Annual Report of the State Board of Massachusetts (Boston, 1891).
- 5.
For a wonderful and more thorough overview of the field, see Richard H. Steckel, “Heights and Human Welfare: Recent Developments and New Directions,” Explorations in Economic History 46, no. 1 (2009): 1–2; Beyond anthropometric publications being published in top mainstream economic, development, and human biology journals, its own journal has even been established, Economics and Human Biology. Major academic publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, and Routledge have all published major monographs in anthropometric history, and continue to do so. For an excellent recent example, see Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong, eds., The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- 6.
Floud et al., The Changing Body, 11.
- 7.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Nicole Bernageau and Yvonne Pasquet, “Le Conscrit et l’ordinateur: Perspectives de recherches sur les Archives Militaries du XIX siecle Français,” Studi Storici 10, no. 2 (1969): 260–308. For brief English discussions on the importance of Le Roy Ladurie’s work, and excellent introductions to anthropometric history in general, see John Komlos, Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 24–25; Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Timothy Cuff, “Historical Anthropometrics,” EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples (29 August 2004); Boris Mironov, The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia, 1700–1917, ed. Gregory Freeze (New York: Routledge, 2012), chapter 2.
- 8.
Robert Margo and Richard Steckel, “The Height of American Slaves: New Evidence on Slave Nutrition and Health,” Social Science History 6, no. 4 (1982): 516–538.
- 9.
Please see the recent top seller in Russian anthropometric history: Mironov, The Standard of Living.
- 10.
Steckel, “Heights and Human Welfare”.
- 11.
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fogels (New York: Penguin, 1998), 380.
- 12.
Stanley L. Engerman, “The Height of US Slaves,” Local Population Studies 16 (1976): 45–49; Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974).
- 13.
A man in a certain region of Russia in the nineteenth century, for example, could select another man in his stead. Often, a community was told they must give a certain number of military-age men for the army and, here too, there was some leniency.
- 14.
See for example, Sara Horrell and Deborah Oxley, “Crust or Crumb? Intrahousehold Resource Allocation and Male Breadwinning in late Victorian Britain,” The Economic History Review 52, no. 3 (1991); Sara Horrell, David Meredith and Deborah Oxley, “Measuring Misery: Body Mass, Ageing and Gender Inequality in Victorian London,” Explorations in Economic History 46, no. 1 (2009).
- 15.
Siddiq Osmani and Amartya Sen, “The Hidden Penalties of Gender Inequality: Fetal Origins of Ill- Health,” Economics and Human Biology 1, no. 1 (2003): 105–121.
- 16.
Sally Macintyre, “Inequalities in Health: Is Research Gender Blind?” in Poverty Inequality and Health. An International Perspective, ed. David A. Leon and Gill Walt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 283–293.
- 17.
Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Cormac Ó. Grada, “Anthropometric History: What’s in it for Ireland?” Histoire & Mesure 11, no. 1–2, no. 3 (1996): 139–166.
- 18.
Joël Floris, Kaspar Staub and Ulric Woitek, “The Benefits of Intervention: Birth Weights in Basle 1912–1920,” University of Zurich, Department of Economics, Working Paper No. 236 (27 October 2016).
- 19.
Janet Currie and Enrico Moretti, “Biology as Destiny? Short- and Long- Run Determinants of Intergenerational Transmission of Birth Weight,” Journal of Labor Economics 25, no. 2 (2007): 231–263; A. J. Drake and B. R. Walker, “The Intergenerational Effects of Fetal Programming: Non-genomic Mechanisms for the Inheritance of Low Birth Weight and Cardiovascular Risk,” Journal of Endocrinology 180, no. 1 (2004): 1–16.
- 20.
Nikola Koepke and Jörg Baten discuss some of these in their article “Agricultural Specialization and Height in Ancient and Medieval Europe,” Explorations in Economic History 45 (2008): 127–146.
- 21.
Richard H. Steckel, Paul W. Sciulli and Jerome C. Rose, “A Health Index from Skeletal Remains,” in The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, ed. Richard H. Steckel and Jerome C. Rose (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 61–93; Clark Spencer Larsen, Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Jane E. Buikstra and Lane A. Beck, eds., Bioarchaeologya: The Contextual Analysis of Human Remains (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006).
- 22.
Ayao Edward Halealoha, “Native Burials: Human Rights and Sacred Bones,” Cultural Survival 24, no. 1 (2000).
- 23.
José Villar, Leila Cheikh Ismail, Cesar G. Victora, “International Standards for Newborn Weight, Length, and Head Circumference by Gestational Age and Sex: The Newborn Cross- Sectional Study of the INTERGROWTH-21 Project,” Lancet 384, no. 9946 (2014): 857–868.
- 24.
Walter Kruse and Kurt Hintze, Sparsame Ernährung Nach Erhebung im Krieg und Frieden (Dresden: Verlag des Deutsches Hygiene-Museums, 1922).
- 25.
Sarah B. Campbell, “Waists, Health and History: Obesity in Nineteenth Century Britain,” D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. Unpublished.
- 26.
Koepke and Baten “Agricultural Specialization,” 136.
- 27.
See for example World Health Organization, Comparative Quantification of Health Risks, Global and Regional Burden of Disease Attributable to Selected Major Risk Factors, vol. 1 (2004), 63, compared to P.S. Shetty and W.P.T. James, “BMI as an Indicator of CED,” in Body Mass Index—A Measure of Chronic Energy Deficiency in Adults, ed. P. S. Shetty and W.P.T. James (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1994). Both of these publications have slightly different cut-offs: A BMI of 18.5 for the FAO, and 20 for the WHO.
- 28.
Richard H. Steckel, “Percentiles of Modern Height Standards for Use in Historical Research,” NBR Working Paper Series on Historical Factors in Long Run Growth (October 1995), Historical Paper 75; J. M. Tanner, R.H. Whitehouse and M. Takaishi, “Standards from Birth to Maturity for Height, Weight, Height Velocity, and Weight Velocity: British Children, 1965. Part I,” Archives of Disease in Childhood 41 (1966): 454–471; J.M. Tanner, R.H. Whitehouse and M. Takaishi, “Standards from Birth to Maturity for Height, Weight, Height Velocity, and Weight Velocity: British Children, 1965. Part II,” Archives of Disease in Childhood 41 (1966): 613–635; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Growth Charts (2010).
- 29.
Mary E. Cox, “Hunger Games or How the Allied Blockade in the First World War Deprived German Children of Nutrition, and Allied Food Aid Subsequently Saved them,” The Economic History Review 68, no. 2 (2015): 600–663.
- 30.
Daniel Schwekendiek “Height and Weight Differences between North and South Korea,” Journal of Biosocial Science 41, no. 1 (2009): 51–55.
- 31.
An allele is an alternative form of a gene, sometimes resulting in a different phenotype.
- 32.
Daniel Schwekendiek and S. Pak. “Recent Growth of Children in the Two Koreas: A Meta-Analysis,” Economics & Human Biology 7, no. 1 (2009): 109–112.
- 33.
Schwekendiek managed to use anthropometric measurements taken by aid workers in children in North Korea. These are limited—because aid workers have not been allowed in for some time, and because the North Korean government does not wish their children to be measured by aid workers. Schwekendiek and his colleagues also used measurements taken from escaped North Korean refugees, and compared these to South Koreans of the same age cohort.
- 34.
Schwekendiek and Pak, “Recent Growth,” 109–112.
- 35.
John Comlos and Leonard Carlson, “The Anthropometric History of Native Americans, C.1820–1890,” Research in Economic History 30 (2014): 135–161.
- 36.
Boas was not only interested in anthropometric measurements, but in culture and language. Much of his collection, a treasure-trove, is located in the archive of the American Philosophical Society, and referenced as ‘Franz Boas field notebooks and anthropometric data, American Philosophical Society.’
- 37.
Richard Jantz, David Hunt, Anthony Falsetti and P.J. Key, “Variation among North Amerindians: Analysis of Boas’s Anthropometric Data,” Human Biology 67, no. 3 (1995): 337–344; Richard Jantz, “The Anthropometric Legacy of Franz Boas,” Economics and Human Biology 1, no. 2 (2003): 277–284.
- 38.
E. J. Szathmáry, “Overview of the Boas Anthropometric Collection and its Utility in Understanding the Biology of Native North Americans,” Human Biology 67, no. 3 (1995): 345–353.
- 39.
Mary E. Cox, Hunger and the Allied Blockade of Germany: Malnutrition and Humanitarian Aid, 1914–1924. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
- 40.
As cited by Holger Holwig, “Total Rhetoric, Limited War: Germany’s U-Boat Campaign, 1917–1918,” in Great War, Total War. Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front. 1914–1917, ed. Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 189.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cox, M.E. (2018). Anthropometrics: The Application of Anthropometrics to Identify and Assess War Crimes. In: War Crimes Trials and Investigations. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64072-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64072-3_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64071-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-64072-3
eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)