Alamannic Warriors and Hillfort, 5th century AD

 

There are many wrong informations about the life and the general appearance of the people who lived in the late Antiquity/Dark Ages.

First of all: folks were not always short!

According to the data of the beautiful Archaeologisches Landesmuseum Baden-Württemberg in Konstanz (average height of the men at 172 cm and at 162 cm for the women in Alamannic area, www.konstanz.alm-bw.de), the archaeologist of the Oxford University Sally Crawford writes about the Anglo-Saxons:

“(the earliest cemeteries) show that the population buried in these Germanic burial grounds was a little taller than the population associated to the late Romano-British cemeteries, with males standing at about 173 cm and females at 162 cm on average. (…) The evidence from the early Anglo-Saxon inhumation cemeteries shows that the population was relatively healty, with little bone evidence for diseases caused by malnutrition or deficiency in the diet.”

©Sally Crawford, “Anglo-Saxon England”, Shire Publications, 2011, page 65.

The results of the measurements of Charlemagne's tibia indicates that he was 1.84 m tall!