Determining Minimum Number of Individuals by Weight: A Case Study from Clinton County, New York

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For any faunal osteologist MNI is key to help identify the context of burials, mass graves, archaeological sites, food processing, etc. There is great difficulty in identifying the MNI with unidentifiable bone fragments. Here we present a study of prehistoric Odocoileus virginianus (white-tailed deer) bones from SUNY Plattsburgh archaeological field school as compared to the modern deer bones in the Hunter comparative faunal collection at SUNY Plattsburgh. By estimating the average degradation of bones over time and comparing them to our modern collections we are able to create a ballpark estimate for our calculation-based approach to MNI. This process is in the early stages of development and can only account for one prehistoric collection and diagenetic context. Here we will present this method and findings to illustrate how understanding one degradation average may be a useful tool to use in combination with MNI as an alternative measure, especially when bone identification is impossible due to fragmentation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51729