Keen
Well-Known Member
5'2" average height for a Roman male?! Where did you get that from? Seriously, I am very interested to know.
Assuming that:
*by Roman we are referring Romans in Britain and Romano-British, and accepting that...
* assessing height in a skeletal population is not as easy as you might think (you really need the femur bone at least and pref. also the lower leg bones as well as the pelvis so you can categorically 'sex' the skeleton - assignments of sex based on skull alone or, even worse, arm and leg bones metrics do not take into account that active women are more heavily muscled than the samples that used in devising the figures in e.g. W. Bass Human Osteology so women get misclassified as men, bringing down the mean)...
*and accepting that different archaeological samples may have different factors acting on them which mean we do not get a realistic representation of the live population...
nonetheless, you can be fairly certain that the evidence from e.g.: Poundbury camp, Dorchester, is a good guide. There, heights were pretty similar to our current, modern population.
Also, in broad brush strokes see Kunitz (link below) which gives mean male height n= 327 individuals from a site dating 43 AD to 407 AD as 171.1 cm (standard deviation = 5.23) giving a range of 5'5"-5' 9", mean of 5' 7".
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1139741/?page=7
Apologies to OP for hi-jacking. You look fine to me
Like I said before though, and as Cortez said, listen to your pone.