Minimum Animal Units and the Standardized Count Problem

Breslawski, Ryan P.

doi:10.1007/s10816-022-09563-9

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 81 publications

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“…NISP is one of the two most common proxies for specimen abundance in zooarchaeology and is more consistently reported globally than others (e.g. minimum number of individuals, minimum number of elements, minimum animal units) [148,[152][153][154]. It is accepted that NISP is an imperfect proxy for the historic abundance of fauna; it is key to note that NISP is subject to numerous biases, including, but not exclusively, problems associated with differential fragmentation and transportation [148].…”

Section: Data Typementioning

confidence: 99%

Archaeological evidence of resource utilisation of the great whales over the past two millennia: A systematic review protocol

Buss,

van den Hurk,

Falahati-Anbaran

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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Archaeological faunal remains provide key insights into human societies in the past, alongside information on previous resource utilisation and exploitation of wildlife populations. The great whales (Mysticete and sperm whales) were hunted unsustainably throughout the 16th - 20th centuries (herein defined as the modern period) leading to large population declines and variable recovery patterns among species. Humans have utilised whales as a resource through carcass scavenging for millennia; however, increasing local and regional ethnographic and archaeological evidence suggests that, prior to the modern period, hunting of the great whales was more common than previously thought; impacts of earlier hunting pressures on the population ecology of many whale species remains relatively unknown. Hunting guided by traditional ecological knowledge may have been sustainable and likely originated in societies that also incorporated opportunistic use of stranded individuals. The collation of georeferenced zooarchaeological data of the great whales between the 1st - 20th centuries CE worldwide will provide insight into the timescale and distribution of resource utilisation of the great whales and how this varied within and between societies, and may have changed over time. By comparing regions of known resource utilisation and breeding and feeding grounds of current-day whale populations, this information will subsequently be used to infer regions where whale populations were possibly lost or extirpated prior to detailed historical records. This systematic review protocol also provides a template for archaeologists, ecologists, and historians interested in using faunal remains to infer historical ecology and resource use of wild animal populations. The transparency of our data collection approach provides opportunities for reproducibility and comparability with future datasets.

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Section: Data Typementioning

confidence: 99%

Archaeological evidence of resource utilisation of the great whales over the past two millennia: A systematic review protocol

Buss,

van den Hurk,

Falahati-Anbaran

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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Estimating the Ontogenetic Age and Sex Composition of Faunal Assemblages with Bayesian Multilevel Mixture Models

Wolfhagen

2023

J Archaeol Method Theory

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Understanding the ontogenetic age and sex composition of zooarchaeological assemblages can reveal details about past human hunting and herding strategies as well as past animal morphology and behavior. As such, the accuracy of our estimates underlies our ability to ascertain details about site formation and gain insights into how people interacted with different animals in the past. Unfortunately, our estimates typically rely on only a small number of bones, limiting our ability to fruitfully use these estimates to make meaningful comparisons to theoretical expectations or even between multiple assemblages. This paper describes a method to use zooarchaeological remains with standard biometric measurements to estimate the ontogenetic age and sex composition of the assemblage, focused on immature, adult-sized female, and adult-sized male specimens. The model uses a Bayesian framework to ensure that the parameter estimates are biologically meaningful. Simulated assemblages show that the model can accurately estimate the biometry and composition of zooarchaeological assemblages. Two archaeological case studies also show how the model can be applied to produce tangible insights. The first, focused on sheep from Neolithic Pinarbaşı B, highlights the model’s ability to elucidate site formation and function. The second, focused on cattle remains from four assemblages from 7th-6th millennium BCE northwestern Anatolia, showcases how to use the mixture modeling results to compare assemblages to one another and to specific hypotheses. This modeling framework provides a new avenue for investigating long-term trajectories in animal biometry alongside contextual analyses of past human choices in butchery and consumption.

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Minimum Animal Units and the Standardized Count Problem

Cited by 2 publications

References 81 publications

Archaeological evidence of resource utilisation of the great whales over the past two millennia: A systematic review protocol

Archaeological evidence of resource utilisation of the great whales over the past two millennia: A systematic review protocol

Estimating the Ontogenetic Age and Sex Composition of Faunal Assemblages with Bayesian Multilevel Mixture Models

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