เปรียบเทียบวิธี

	Paleodemographic Analysis	Number of Identified Specimens (NISP)
สาขาวิชา	โบราณคดี	โบราณคดี
ตระกูล	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
ปีกำเนิด	1982	2008
ผู้ริเริ่ม	Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel & Claude Masset (critique); Rostock School (hazard-model solution)	Standard zooarchaeological practice; statistical properties formalized by Donald Grayson and R. Lee Lyman
ประเภท	Inferential pipeline for estimating mortality, fertility, and age structure from skeletal age-at-death distributions	Primary observational tally of identified bone specimens per taxon
แหล่งต้นตำรับ	Bocquet-Appel, J.-P., & Masset, C. (1982). Farewell to Paleodemography. Journal of Human Evolution, 11(4), 321-333.	Reitz, E. J., & Wing, E. S. (2008). Zooarchaeology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521673938
ชื่อเรียกอื่น	Paleodemography, Skeletal Demography, Past Population Mortality Analysis, Osteological Demography	NISP, Identified Specimen Count, Faunal Fragment Count, Specimen Tally
ที่เกี่ยวข้อง	2	2
สรุป	Paleodemographic analysis reconstructs the demographic life of past populations — their mortality schedules, life expectancy, age structure, and fertility — from the age-at-death distributions of skeletal samples. It begins from the per-individual ages produced by osteological estimation and aggregates them into life tables or, increasingly, fits formal mortality models. The field was reshaped by Bocquet-Appel and Masset's bracing 1982 critique, 'Farewell to Paleodemography,' which exposed two fatal biases: the tendency of skeletal age estimates to mimic the age structure of the reference sample rather than the target population, and the corrupting effect of age-estimation error. The modern response, developed by the Rostock School and others, abandons naive life tables in favor of hazard models and Bayesian estimation that treat the observed data as the noisy product of a true mortality schedule.	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.