Liz,
I too have just taught quantification and over the years have tried paper assemblages, pcopies of bones colour coded by species and fragmented (chopped up). You can then get them to count by colour and then by element and then by MNE and MNI - however anything that you can break up and then recount will do. I have considered sweets, cakes, chocolate bars etc etc.....it doesn't really matter.
Or try biscuits, you could have a tin of biscuits as your assemblage and get the to work out the population after a bit of consumption and taphonomy! Was it a chocolate digestive dominated culture or has the preferential predation of the more fragile pink wafers caused them to be under-represented in the assemblage......leaving the more robust (and less desirable) ginger biscuits appearing to be most common?
Anything will do as a demonstration - often they do better visualising quantifiying humans in a mass disaster (boy do they love forensics) rather than body parts of animals (and you can bring in aging, sexing info as well as body parts).
Must get back to work....
Jacqui
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