Archaeological Quantification

Archaeological research often involves comparing sites or contexts within sites in terms of densities and proportions of things that we could count, such as artifacts, charred seeds, or animal bones and their fragments. In many cases, we’d ideally like to be able to do this in terms of whole tools, pots, animals and so on, or even in terms of the amount of food that various animals or plants could have contributed to diet. However, what we really have, in most cases, are samples of broken and otherwise poorly preserved things that have only an indirect relationship to the things of greatest interest. This video discusses some of the common kinds of quantification in archaeology, including identifiable fragment counts (NISP), minimum number of individuals (MNI and MNV), and estimated equivalents (EVE and ETE). It wraps up with some discussion of two non-abundance measures, ubiquity and diversity. My book, The Archaeologist’s Laboratory, has a chapter on quantification: