Dusting off ancient anthropometric data banks: the “Mainz Punch Card Archive” and “Geneva ADAM” and their integration with the updated and enlarged LiVES-COstA online database

The research project LiVES (living conditions and biological standard of living in prehistoric Europe and South West Asia), funded by the Emmy-Noether-Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and running from 2011 to 2019, focused - among other things - on the relationship between protein-intake and body height in prehistoric humans as a possible proxy for health and diet 1 . In order to obtain a sufficient amount of data relating to prehistoric body heights within the project’s timespan, which could then be correlated with relevant environmental, chronological and socio-historic variables, it was necessary to acquire and convert datasets from two already existing data collections: the Mainzer Lochkartenarchiv fur prahistorische und historische Anthropologie (Mainz punch card archive for prehistoric and historic anthropology) and the Geneva- based Anthropological Data Acquisition and Management (ADAM); they were eventually integrated with a new and regularly updated online database LiVES Collection of Osteological Anthropometry (LiVES-COstA) which, aside from our own purposes, is intended for future use by academic institutions and individual researchers around the world. With checked and published data from 6901 skeletal individuals dating up to 600 cal BCE, and a total of 18,127 unchecked, unpublished skeletal entries mostly dating to later periods, it is currently the largest digital collection of prehistoric and historic human long bone and stature data from Europe and Southwest Asia. In this article we will give a detailed report on the data acquisition and integration process within the framework of the LiVES-project, and describe the structure, as well as the state of data at the end of the project. Also, we will give a very brief summary on the publication of those datasets that have been checked and updated by the LiVES project in the LiVES-COstA Digest-collection.