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Because a peer-reviewed article published in 2005 which I did link says "Lawrence Angel's anthropological studies of Greek skeletal remains give mean heights fo

Because a peer-reviewed article published in 2005 which I did link says "Lawrence Angel's anthropological studies of Greek skeletal remains give mean heights for Classical Greek males of 170.5 cm or 5' 7.1" (n = 58) and for Hellenistic Greek males of 171.9 cm or 5' 7.7" (n = 28), and his figures have been corroborated by further studies of material from Corinth and the Athenian Kerameikos." and cites studies by Angel et al. 1985, Robinson 1984, and Kovacsovics 1990 and his own work on Italy. And when someone's later article says n=170, but an earlier article says n=163, usually they changed their mind in the meantime, especially when the first article had to use the data from another country available in the middle of a war and analyze it with pencil and paper. Archaeology continued after 1945 and electronic computers became a thing! It is possible that some person might have scanned the 1985 book and posted an unofficial copy but tracking things like that down is your job.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
> And when someone's later article says n=170, but an earlier article says n=163, usually they changed their mind in the meantime, especially when the first article had to use the data from another country available in the middle of a war and analyze it with pencil and paper. Archaeology continued after 1945 and electronic computers became a thing! > It is possible that some person might have scanned the 1985 book and posted an unofficial copy but tracking things like that down is your job. "Usually"? This is pure conjecture. I don't suppose you've even read the 1985 paper? It could be different samples, from different locations, which date to different eras. I believe there's a Mycenean tomb with a few skeletons at an average of 170cm, though the sample size was very small. This sort of thing is much more likely than "oops, we made a measuring error and were off by almost 10cm!!" (Were this the case, Angel would have published a correction.) There are lots of different possibilities. It could certainly be the case that the 1985 paper is being misquoted or misused. That Kron didn't even mention the 1945 paper, when building an argument that sought to contradict its findings, speaks volumes of his so-called ethics and must lead an unbiased observer to believe that something is amiss. That is, at the very least, a clear case of cherry-picking in the academic literature. > Archaeology continued after 1945 and electronic computers became a thing! Indeed, yet, as I've said, a very detailed 2023 review found results far closer to Angel's 1945 results. What are your thoughts on this?
- pixodaros 2y ago
  Meta-analyses such as the 2023 study need a lot of attention to interpret correctly, and I can't spare that time right now. Have you read the 2005 study? Note 25 of the 1945 article says that its stature estimates are based on a total of 63 males from all periods, but when Angel returned to the problem in 1985 he cited 52 males from the classical period alone, so clearly he had acquired more data. There are many different ways of estimating stature by measuring bones and best practices may have changed from 1945 to 1985. Here is the table 4 from his 1985 article. https://www.bookandsword.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-from-2024-10-25-13-51-38.png https://www.bookandsword.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Scre...
  - A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
    Fascinating. Thanks for digging that up. Let's say we have 95% confidence for a range between 162-170cm through the entire Iron Age, continuing through the Classical period. I believe that could still plausibly make for a substantial enough difference in hand breadth -- plausibly >1cm -- such that grips that seem unusually small today would have seemed merely snug back then. It's also possible that certain relic swords were designed to fit users who were under the mean height of their era. (Even, in some cases where grips were smaller than 7cm in length, adolescents.)
    - pixodaros 2y ago
      You might think so, but if you do the math, the difference between 165 cm tall and 180 cm tall scaled to an 8 cm wide hand is only 7 mm. And Roland is rather tall, so if he can hold a sword in a certain way, smaller people certainly could! He has addressed this in earlier posts like https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-were-bronze-110099337 https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-were-bronze-110099337
      - A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
        I have US Military data on soldier height and hand breadth. (Interestingly, height seems to skew a little bit short.) It's at: https://ibb.co/LRhMbVW https://ibb.co/LRhMbVW So say a sword was made for a more or less average Greek, at 165cm, placing him in the modern Army's 5th percentile. His hand is 8.1cm wide, diagonally, at the knuckle. A 180cm man is in the modern 75th percentile, and his hand is 9.1cm wide. There's a 1cm or nearly 1/2" difference. My own hand is ~9.8cm wide at the knuckle (which means that shopping for gloves is a real pain,) and would be nearly 2cm wider than that average Greek's. A short Greek, say at around 160cm, might be under 7.7cm in hand breadth; there'd be more than 2cm between us. So there can be quite a lot of variance. It doesn't appear to scale with height in a totally linear way. In the context of sword grips, 1cm is a lot and 2cm is huge. Ian Peirce's book "Swords of the Viking Age" gives grip length data on a few dozen 8th-11th century swords, and the average is just 8.58cm. (With a couple as high as 11cm and one as low as 6.8cm, but almost all examples in a narrow range between 8 and 9.5cm.) Swords of the Naue II type, made for men somewhat shorter than 10th century Norsemen, seem to cluster around 7-8cm of usable grip length. Perhaps this is just what we'd expect to see, if we operate under the assumption that, like those Norsemen, they liked their grips very snug and weren't in the habit of wearing gauntlets. Anyway, this thread is buried and it's getting hard to keep up with. I'd be happy to discuss further via email. Mine is on my user id page. Maybe, between the two of us, we can solve this mystery.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago

> And when someone's later article says n=170, but an earlier article says n=163, usually they changed their mind in the meantime, especially when the first article had to use the data from another country available in the middle of a war and analyze it with pencil and paper. Archaeology continued after 1945 and electronic computers became a thing! > It is possible that some person might have scanned the 1985 book and posted an unofficial copy but tracking things like that down is your job. "Usually"? This is pure conjecture. I don't suppose you've even read the 1985 paper? It could be different samples, from different locations, which date to different eras. I believe there's a Mycenean tomb with a few skeletons at an average of 170cm, though the sample size was very small. This sort of thing is much more likely than "oops, we made a measuring error and were off by almost 10cm!!" (Were this the case, Angel would have published a correction.) There are lots of different possibilities. It could certainly be the case that the 1985 paper is being misquoted or misused. That Kron didn't even mention the 1945 paper, when building an argument that sought to contradict its findings, speaks volumes of his so-called ethics and must lead an unbiased observer to believe that something is amiss. That is, at the very least, a clear case of cherry-picking in the academic literature. > Archaeology continued after 1945 and electronic computers became a thing! Indeed, yet, as I've said, a very detailed 2023 review found results far closer to Angel's 1945 results. What are your thoughts on this?

pixodaros 2y ago
Meta-analyses such as the 2023 study need a lot of attention to interpret correctly, and I can't spare that time right now. Have you read the 2005 study? Note 25 of the 1945 article says that its stature estimates are based on a total of 63 males from all periods, but when Angel returned to the problem in 1985 he cited 52 males from the classical period alone, so clearly he had acquired more data. There are many different ways of estimating stature by measuring bones and best practices may have changed from 1945 to 1985. Here is the table 4 from his 1985 article. https://www.bookandsword.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-from-2024-10-25-13-51-38.png https://www.bookandsword.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Scre...
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  Fascinating. Thanks for digging that up. Let's say we have 95% confidence for a range between 162-170cm through the entire Iron Age, continuing through the Classical period. I believe that could still plausibly make for a substantial enough difference in hand breadth -- plausibly >1cm -- such that grips that seem unusually small today would have seemed merely snug back then. It's also possible that certain relic swords were designed to fit users who were under the mean height of their era. (Even, in some cases where grips were smaller than 7cm in length, adolescents.)
  - pixodaros 2y ago
    You might think so, but if you do the math, the difference between 165 cm tall and 180 cm tall scaled to an 8 cm wide hand is only 7 mm. And Roland is rather tall, so if he can hold a sword in a certain way, smaller people certainly could! He has addressed this in earlier posts like https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-were-bronze-110099337 https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-were-bronze-110099337
    - A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
      I have US Military data on soldier height and hand breadth. (Interestingly, height seems to skew a little bit short.) It's at: https://ibb.co/LRhMbVW https://ibb.co/LRhMbVW So say a sword was made for a more or less average Greek, at 165cm, placing him in the modern Army's 5th percentile. His hand is 8.1cm wide, diagonally, at the knuckle. A 180cm man is in the modern 75th percentile, and his hand is 9.1cm wide. There's a 1cm or nearly 1/2" difference. My own hand is ~9.8cm wide at the knuckle (which means that shopping for gloves is a real pain,) and would be nearly 2cm wider than that average Greek's. A short Greek, say at around 160cm, might be under 7.7cm in hand breadth; there'd be more than 2cm between us. So there can be quite a lot of variance. It doesn't appear to scale with height in a totally linear way. In the context of sword grips, 1cm is a lot and 2cm is huge. Ian Peirce's book "Swords of the Viking Age" gives grip length data on a few dozen 8th-11th century swords, and the average is just 8.58cm. (With a couple as high as 11cm and one as low as 6.8cm, but almost all examples in a narrow range between 8 and 9.5cm.) Swords of the Naue II type, made for men somewhat shorter than 10th century Norsemen, seem to cluster around 7-8cm of usable grip length. Perhaps this is just what we'd expect to see, if we operate under the assumption that, like those Norsemen, they liked their grips very snug and weren't in the habit of wearing gauntlets. Anyway, this thread is buried and it's getting hard to keep up with. I'd be happy to discuss further via email. Mine is on my user id page. Maybe, between the two of us, we can solve this mystery.