Zooarchaeological Quantification

Zooarchaeological quantification is the set of methods used to convert a pile of identified animal bones into estimates of how abundant each taxon and each body part was in a faunal assemblage. No single number does the job: the discipline relies on a family of complementary measures — the number of identified specimens (NISP), the minimum number of individuals (MNI), the minimum number of skeletal elements (MNE), the minimum animal units (MAU), and biomass estimates from allometric regression. Each captures a different facet of abundance and carries its own biases, so analysts compute several and interpret them against one another. The synthesis by Reitz and Wing codifies these measures for working zooarchaeologists, while Lyman's taphonomic treatment exposes how fragmentation, recovery, and density-mediated attrition distort every one of them.