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The principle of the minimum number of individuals was defined by the North American ethnologist T. E. White in 1953. [ 1 ] The principle of MNI accounts for each possible individual human or animal as an individual unit in the most parsimonious way, meaning to count the lowest number of individuals in an archaeological site.
A set of mammal bones which may be from several specimens. In various archaeological disciplines including archaeology, forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, osteoarchaeology and zooarchaeology, the number of identified specimens (also number of individual specimens or number of individual species), or NISP, is defined as the number of identified specimens for a specific site.
Skull found in the archaeological site of Herxheim, exhibited in the museum of Heidelberg University. The archaeological site of Herxheim, located in the municipality of Herxheim in southwest Germany, was a ritual center and a mass grave formed by people of the Linear Pottery culture (LBK) culture in Neolithic Europe.
Once bones are collected, cleaned, and labeled, specialists begin to identify the type of bone and what species the bone came from. The number of identified bones are counted as well as the weight of each sample and the minimum number of individuals. The age and sex of an animal can be used to determine information about hunting and agriculture.
Classical archaeology is the study of the past using both material evidence (i.e. artifacts and their contexts) and documentary evidence (including maps, literature of the time, other primary sources, etc.). Classical archaeology specifically pertains to the Mediterranean area and the archaeology of Greece and its surrounding areas.
Other threats to the archaeological record include natural phenomena and scavenging. Archaeology can be a destructive science for the finite resources of the archaeological record are lost to excavation. Therefore, archaeologists limit the amount of excavation that they do at each site and keep meticulous records of what is found.
In archaeology, lithic analysis is the analysis of stone tools and other chipped stone artifacts using basic scientific techniques. At its most basic level, lithic analyses involve an analysis of the artifact's morphology, the measurement of various physical attributes, and examining other visible features (such as noting the presence or absence of cortex, for example).
Information is determined by assessing the ratio of different isotopes of a particular element in a sample. The most widely studied and used isotopes in archaeology are carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, strontium and calcium. [2] An isotope is an atom of an element with an abnormal number of neutrons, changing their atomic mass. [2]