Counting Things: Abundance and Other Quantitative Measures

Abstract

This chapter reviews a number of measures used to describe abundance or other qualities in archaeological samples or to estimate quantities in some “population” on the basis of indirect measures in a subset of that population. These include fragment counts (“NISP”), mass, and several measures, such as Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI) and Estimated Vessel Equivalents (EVE), that are supposed to control for some of the factors that intrude between an original population and an imperfectly preserved sample of that population, such as fragmentation, differences in identifiable elements, and differential survival. The chapter concludes with some non-abundance measures, including ubiquity, diversity, and fractal dimension.