Compare methods

	Zooarchaeological Quantification	Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI)
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	2008
Originator	Elizabeth Reitz & Elizabeth Wing (synthesis); R. Lee Lyman (critical formalization)	Theodore E. White (1953 procedure); aggregation critique by Donald Grayson
Type	Suite of quantitative measures of taxonomic and skeletal-part abundance in faunal assemblages	Derived estimate of the smallest number of animals consistent with the skeletal elements present
Seminal source	Reitz, E. J., & Wing, E. S. (2008). Zooarchaeology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521673938	Reitz, E. J., & Wing, E. S. (2008). Zooarchaeology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521673938
Aliases	Faunal Quantification, Measures of Taxonomic Abundance, Faunal Abundance Estimation, Bone Quantification	MNI, Minimum Individual Count, Minimum Number Estimation, Individual Count
Related	3	2
Summary	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.	The minimum number of individuals, abbreviated MNI, estimates the smallest number of whole animals that could account for the bones identified in a faunal assemblage. Where NISP counts identifiable pieces, MNI translates those pieces into a defensible lower bound on the number of animals by exploiting the fact that each animal has a fixed inventory — only one left femur, two scapulae, and so on. The basic procedure, introduced by Theodore White in 1953 and refined since, takes the most abundant element after accounting for side and age and divides by its frequency in a complete skeleton. As Reitz and Wing explain and Lyman analyzes critically, MNI tames NISP's fragmentation bias but introduces a bias of its own: it depends on how the assemblage is aggregated into analytical units, the so-called aggregation problem.