| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Richard H. Steckel and Jerome C. Rose, editors. The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xx, 633. $75.00.
The origins of this long-awaited study can be traced back to the late 1980s, when a group of anthropologists concluded that much could be learned from combining the research methodologies of economic historians and physical anthropologists in order to measure health trends among Native American, European-American, and African-American populations living in the New World before the twentieth century. During the 1990s, scholars convened at three major conferences where they shared the findings of their individual research projects. This book, edited by anthropologists Richard H. Steckel and Jerome C. Rose, includes twenty-two essays that analyze long-term trends in human health throughout the Western Hemisphere from 5,000 B.C. to the late nineteenth century. Of the 12,520 individuals from sixty-five sites whose skeletal remains were analyzed in these studies, eighty percent derived from Native Americans, while the rest were from individuals of African and European descent. The geographic origins of the samples varied widely: two-thirds came from North America, twelve percent from Mesoamerica, and twenty-two percent from South America; slightly over half of the remains dated from the period before 1492.	1
This volume is particularly important for several reasons: first, all of the data were uniformly coded, enabling scholars to make valuable comparisons between populations; second, the size and diversity of the data by region, time, and ethnic groups is unequaled; third, the project was designed to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration; and fourth, the questions posed by these researchers are broader in scope than those raised in the past.	. . .

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