> Except for some rare instances, the one really nice thing about
> NISP is that people understand how you calculated it and little
> justification needs to be given for the methods of counting it,
Dear Brian,
Hope you don't mind me taking issue on this statement. NISP is the
Number of Identified Specimens, and, if we can all quite easily agree
about what a "number" is, the words "identified" and "specimens" badly
need to be explained and justified as they can mean different things
to different people.
For instance, when is something "identified"? As an anatomical
element, a species, one of two possible species, a genus, a family, a
class, etc etc? And what is a "specimen"? People who use a "diagnostic
zone" system, will be able to define it without troubles, according to
their very personal system, but for the many people who count any
possibly identifiable (whatever that means) specimen, what a
"specimen" is will vary according to the experience of the analyst,
the type of assemblage, the level of fragmentation, the type, of
bone, the time of the day they are recording their bones, how much
sleep they had the day before etc etc etc.
This is just to say that NISP, far from reflecting a natural status of
a bone assemblage, is in fact as an artifical system as all others and
equally needs to be justified. This question has greater implications.
There is a widespread belief in the zooarchaeological world (and I'm
not suggesting for a second that you are supporting this view!) that
it is possible to analyse bone assemblages in some kind of fully
objective way and that there are rules that must be followed
religiously (see for instance the debate on "minimum standards").
In fact I believe that there are no fixed rules - particularly as
concerns quantifications - and that not only our final intepretations,
but our analyses too represent an archaeological construction. In our
work we do not discuss "Nature" as it is, but rather our
interpretation of it - and there is nothing wrong about this. I hope
you can all see the link between this consideration and the
quantification debate.
Cheers,
Umberto
Umberto Albarella
Dept of Archaeology
University of Durham
Durham DH1 3LE, UK
tel. +44-191-3741139
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