Confronta i metodi

	Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI)	Number of Identified Specimens (NISP)
Campo	Archeologia	Archeologia
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	2008	2008
Ideatore	Theodore E. White (1953 procedure); aggregation critique by Donald Grayson	Standard zooarchaeological practice; statistical properties formalized by Donald Grayson and R. Lee Lyman
Tipo	Derived estimate of the smallest number of animals consistent with the skeletal elements present	Primary observational tally of identified bone specimens per taxon
Fonte seminale	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
Alias	MNI, Minimum Individual Count, Minimum Number Estimation, Individual Count	NISP, Identified Specimen Count, Faunal Fragment Count, Specimen Tally
Correlati	2	2
Sintesi	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.	The number of identified specimens, universally abbreviated NISP, is the most basic quantitative measure in zooarchaeology: a simple count of every bone or bone fragment that an analyst can identify to a taxon. It is the first number computed for almost any faunal assemblage because it is fast, transparent, additive across deposits, and reproducible. Yet, as Reitz and Wing emphasize and Lyman dissects in detail, NISP is an observation count rather than an animal count, and it is distorted by fragmentation, by recovery technique, and by the fact that fragments of a single bone are not independent of one another. Understanding precisely what NISP does and does not measure is the foundation on which all other faunal abundance estimates rest.