Critical review of the MNI (minimum number of individuals) as a zooarchaeological unit of quantification

Abstract

The use of minimum number of individuals (MNI) in the analysis of mammal archaeofaunal assemblages has received intense criticism for its derived nature and its dependence of biasing variables. Some authors have argued that similar taxonomic variability as documented by MNI can be achieved with other less biased measuring units, such as number of identified specimens (NISP) and derivates thereof. The present study is the first experimentally controlled test that shows the degree of bias of estimates of MNI and NISP by different analysts. It shows that the margins of error of both measuring units are independent and that MNI can be more accurately estimated than NISP, despite its "derived" inferential nature.

The Maya Preclassic to Classic transition observed through faunal trends from Ceibal, Guatemala

“…Specimen quantification strategies have been hotly debated over the last several decades in zooarchaeology [44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54]. In short, there is no single quantification method that works well at every site, nor is every technique equally applicable to solving every question.…”

The York Gospels: a one thousand year biological palimpsest

“…With a low cost and analysis time per sample, this technique has the potential to describe the 13 species composition of many other documents and provide further insights into illuminated manuscript 14 production. 15 16 As, zooarchaeology usually struggles to obtain accurate population sized assemblages, with collections 17 often processed and fragmented and rarely constrained to a narrow time range [39,40]. The analysis of the 18 species composition of manuscripts may have implications, which extend beyond the documents 19 production, by providing a more refined understanding of past animal population sizes with a tighter 20 chronology than can often be obtained from archaeological assemblages alone.…”

“…Dry cleaning with PVC erasers is a common and widely used conservation 36 technique [20], and we analyse the waste material from this process, which would otherwise be discarded. 37 38 We apply our approach to document for the first time the vast array of biological information contained 39 with a single codex, recovering both DNA and proteins from the dry eraser waste of skins from the York 40 Gospels (York Minster Ms. Add. 1).…”

“…Exogenous DNA 10 11 Human 12 As Microbiome 39 To further classify the York Gospels metagenome, recovered sequences were analysed using two 40 independent metagenomic pipelines, One Codex [30] and metaBIT [31] (supplementary figure 6a and b) 41 to try to reduce method-based classification biases [32]. Six samples from archival documents held in the 42…”

Practical Significance: Ordinal Scale Data and Effect Size in Zooarchaeology

“…For example, such tests have been used to interpret shifts in taxonomic abundance over time (e.g., Broughton, 1994aBroughton, , 1994bCannon, 2000;Nagaoka, 2002;Munro, 2004;Braje et al, 2012), relationships between taxonomic richness and sample size (Grayson & Delpech, 1998;Cannon, 2001), taphonomic histories of zooarchaeological faunas (Grayson, 1984;Marean & Spencer, 1991;Lyman, 1994b;Marean & Frey, 1997;Lam et al, 1998;Nagaoka et al, 2008), biometric differences in size of skeletal remains Braje et al, 2012), relationships between different types of quantitative units of taxonomic and skeletal element abundance (Stiner, 1991;Lyman, 1994a;Giovas, 2009;Domínguez-Rodrigo, 2012), and differences in mortality profiles (Klein, 1982;Lyman, 1987;Wolverton, 2006). There are many published examples in which zooarchaeologists mainly base their conclusions on interpretations of descriptive statistics (e.g., Stiner, 1990;Marean & Kim, 1998;Pickering et al, 2003;Reitz, 2004;Steele, 2005;Lyman, 2010); nonetheless, inferential tests are applied to a diverse set of research problems in zooarchaeology.…”