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	Zooarchaeological Quantification	Taphonomic Analysis
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	1994
Originator	Elizabeth Reitz & Elizabeth Wing (synthesis); R. Lee Lyman (critical formalization)	Ivan Efremov (taphonomy concept); R. Lee Lyman (archaeological synthesis)
Type	Suite of quantitative measures of taxonomic and skeletal-part abundance in faunal assemblages	Diagnostic pipeline for reconstructing the formation history of a bone assemblage
Seminal source	Reitz, E. J., & Wing, E. S. (2008). Zooarchaeology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521673938	Lyman, R. L. (1994). Vertebrate Taphonomy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521458405
Aliases	Faunal Quantification, Measures of Taxonomic Abundance, Faunal Abundance Estimation, Bone Quantification	Bone Taphonomy, Faunal Taphonomy, Bone Surface Modification Analysis, Assemblage Formation Analysis
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.	Taphonomic analysis is the study of everything that happens to animal remains between the death of an organism and the moment an archaeologist records its bones, and of how those processes shaped the assemblage we recover. Coined by the paleontologist Ivan Efremov as the 'laws of burial,' taphonomy became a rigorous archaeological method through R. Lee Lyman's Vertebrate Taphonomy, which systematized the reading of bone surfaces, weathering, breakage, and skeletal-part survival. The goal is twofold: to identify which agents — humans, carnivores, water, weathering — accumulated and modified the bones, and to measure how much of the original assemblage was destroyed by density-mediated attrition. Because every quantitative faunal measure depends on these formation processes, taphonomic analysis is the indispensable prelude to interpreting subsistence and behavior from animal bone.