A formalized approach to choosing the best methods for reconstructing stature in the case of poorly preserved skeletal series

Stature, as the universal measure of the well‐being of a population, is one of the three basic characteristics, besides sex and age, of every osteological analysis. Reconstructing living stature using the length of long bones and linear regression is the method of choice, especially in the case of poorly preserved human skeletal material obtained from archaeological excavations. Although the choice of the best formulae is usually based on intuition, the need for a more formal approach is paramount. However, the solutions adopted to date require a significant number of well‐preserved skeletons, which is rarely possible in bioarchaeological research. For skeletal series consisting of very incomplete skeletons, it has been shown that a simple comparison of the mean differences in stature estimation using femur, humerus, and radius bone pairs may be instrumental for selecting the most appropriate of the available stature reconstruction methods. The results were confronted with the consistency of the same methods but also using bones that could not have been used previously; that is the tibia, fibula and ulna. All the methods tested were then compared with those selected as being the most consistent to see if the results they produce are significantly different.